In the Balance w-1

by Harry Turtledove

  But on horseback, you met the world face to face. At the moment, the world was snowing in Jager’s face. The Russians had given him a fur hat, a padded jacket, and felt boots, so he wasn’t chilly. Now that he was inside some of it, he discovered for himself how good Russian cold-weather gear really was. No wonder the Ivans had given the Wehrmacht such grief the winter before.

  He leaned down, spoke confidentially into the horse’s ear. “If anyone ever asks the Kremlin about this, they’ll be able to say they gave me all the help they thought they could, but I just didn’t make it back to Germany with this stuff.” He slapped a saddlebag again. “But do you know what, Russian horse? I’m going to fool them. I’m going to get there whether they want me to or not. And if they don’t like it, they can go piss themselves for all I care.”

  The horse, of course, had no idea what he was talking about. Not only was it a dumb animal, it was a Russian dumb animal. Till recently, it had been either pulling a plow for the enemy or carrying a Red Army cavalryman into action. But for the time being, its fate and his were bound together.

  The snow muffled the animal’s hoolbeats. Its body heat warmed the insides of his thighs and his rear end. His Panzer III, he remembered fondly, had had a heater that would warm all of him. On the other hand, he liked the horse’s grassy smell better than the oil, petrol, cordite reek of the panzer.

  “Yes, that’s how the Kremlin wants it, horse,” he said. “They needed German help to get this metal, but do they want the Reich to have the benefit of it? Not on your life they don’t. They want to be the only ones who can make bombs like this, yes they do. They will use one on the Lizards, and if they beat the Lizards, wouldn’t it be nice for them if they could hold one over Germany’s head, too? But I already told you, horse, I don’t intend to let that happen.”

  He peered ahead through the spattering snow. Unfortunately, what he intended to let happen and what would in fact happen were not necessarily one and the same. He didn’t think he was inside what had been Soviet territory before the war any more, but rather in what was formerly Polish-held Ruthernia. Much of that land, after getting overrun first by the Russians and then by the Germans, was now in the Lizards’ hands.

  And here, as perhaps nowhere else on earth, the Lizards had their willing puppets-their quislings, the British would have called them, Jager thought with wry amusement. In Moscow, he’d listened to Moishe Russie on the shortwave a couple of times. He’d judged the man a hysteric, a liar, and a traitor to mankind.

  Now… now he was not so sure. Every time he tried to laugh off what the Jew said as just another atrocity story, he kept remembering the scar on the side of Max’s neck and the Jewish partisan’s obscenely embellished tale of slaughter and horror at Babi Yar. Much as he wanted to, he didn’t think Max lied. And if Max’s horror was true, then Moishe Russie’s might be, also.

  Riding a horse alone through winter gave-you a chance to think, maybe more of a chance than you really wanted. What had the Reich been doing behind the lines of the territory it held? Jager was a field-grade officer, not a policymaker. But German officers were supposed to think for themselves, not blindly follow superiors’ orders like their Soviet or Lizard counterparts. He could not for the life of him see how massacring Jews moved the war effort forward even a centimeter.

  Massacring Jews might in fact push the war effort back It had driven the Polish Jews who survived into the Lizards’ arms. A lot of those Jews lay between Jager and the Reich. If they spotted him and let their new masters know a German was loose on their territory… if they did that, the Russians’ scheme would be realized in full.

  “Stupid,” he muttered. What did Jews do in battle against the Reich except get in the way like any other civilians?

  He rode by a deserted farmhouse, shook his head. So much devastation. How long would people take to recover from it? Even more to the point, on what terms would they recover? Would they be their own masters, or slaves to the Lizards for untold centuries to come? Jager found no sure answer. Humanity had discovered ways to hurt the Lizards, but not to beat them, not yet. Maybe-he hoped-he held a way to beat them in his saddlebags.

  The road he was following (actually, it was more of a track) took him into a stand of pale-barked birches a few hundred meters past the farmhouse. He unslung his rifle, set it across his knees. Unpleasant things and even more unpleasant people could lurk among trees. He showed his teeth in a not-quite-humorless grin. A few weeks before, he’d been one of those unpleasant people, or so the Lizards. would have said.

  A man stepped out from behind a tree trunk. Like Jager, he wore a mixture of Russian and German winter gear; also like Jager, he carried a rifle. He didn’t aim it at the German, but he looked ready to use it. He said something in Polish. Jager didn’t know any Polish. He weighed his chances as he reined in. If he could get in a quick, sure shot-no guarantee while on horseback-then set spurs to his mount, he had a chance at getting away from this… bandit?

  The fellow might have been thinking along with him. “I wouldn’t try that,” he said, now in accented German-or was it Yiddish? “Look behind you.” Jager didn’t look. The man standing in the track laughed, leaned his rifle against the nearest tree. “No trick. Go ahead and look.”

  This time, Jager did. He could see two men, both with guns. He wondered how many he couldn’t see. He turned back to the fellow in front of him. “All right, you have me,” he said equably. “What happens now?”

  He didn’t know which nonplussed the fellow more, his calm or his clear German. The man grabbed his rifle, a Mauser just like Jager’s. “I thought you were one of those Nazi bastards,” he growled. “You don’t ride like a Pole or a Russian. I ought to shoot you now.” He was speaking Yiddish. Jager’s heart sank.

  “Hold on, Yossel,” called one of the men in back of the German. “We’re supposed to take him in to-”

  “If you’re going to take me to the Lizards, do me the favor of shooting me instead,” Jager broke in. Here was his worst nightmare coming to life around him. If the Lizards made him talk-and who knew what the Lizards could do along those lines? — he might imperil the Russians’ efforts with the stolen metal, and Germany’s would never be born.

  “Why should we do any favors for a German?” Yossel said. Jager heard snarls from behind him. Here indeed was pointless cruelty coming home to roost.

  But Jager had an answer. “Because I fought alongside Russian partisans, most of them Jews, to get what I’m carrying away from the Lizards and bring it back toward Germany.” There. It was done. If these were truly the Lizards’ creatures, he’d just done himself in. But he was done in anyhow, the instant the Lizards found what his saddlebags held. And if his captors were men…

  Yossel spat. “You’re a fast liar, I give you that much. Where was this, on the road to Treblinka?” Seeing that that meant nothing to Jager, he spoke a word of pure German: “Vernichtungslager.” Extermination camp.

  “I don’t know anything of extermination camps,” Jager insisted. The men behind him growled. He wondered if they would shoot him before he could go on. He spoke quickly: “I never heard of this Treblinka. But one of the Jews in the partisan band came back alive from a place called Babi Yar, outside Kiev. He and I worked together for this common good.”

  Something changed in Yossel’s face. “So you know of Babi Yar, do you, Nazi? Tell me what you think of it.”

  “It sickens me,” Jager answered at once. “I went to war against the Red Army, not-not-” He shook his head. “I am a soldier, not a murderer.”

  “As if a Nazi could tell the difference,” Yossel said scornfully. But he did not raise his rifle. He and the other-well, what were they? soldiers? partisans? merely bandits? — talked back and forth, partly in Yiddish, which Jager could follow, and partly in Polish, which he couldn’t. Had the Jew in front of him looked less alert, Jager might have made a break. As it was, he waited for his captors to figure out what to do with him.

  After a couple of minutes, one of
the men behind him said, “All right, off the horse.” Jager dismounted. His back itched uncontrollably. He was ready to whirl and start shooting at the least untoward sound; they would not find a passive victim, if that was what they wanted. But then the fellow he could not see said, “You can sling that rifle, if you care to.”

  Jager hesitated. The invitation could have been a ruse to relax him for easier disposal. But the Jews already had him at their mercy, and no fighting man with even a gram of sense left an enemy armed. Maybe they’d decided he wasn’t altogether an enemy, then. He slid the sling strap over his shoulder, asked, “What do you intend to do with me?”

  “We haven’t decided yet,” Yossel said. “For now, you’ll come with us. We’ll take you to someone who can help us figure it out.” Jager’s face must have said something, for Yossel added, “No, not a Lizard, one of us.”

  “All right,”, Jager said, “but bring the horse, too; what he has in those saddlebags is more important than I am, and your officer will need to know of it.”

  “Gold?” asked the fellow who’d told Jager to get off the horse.

  He didn’t want the Jews to think he was just someone to be robbed. “No, not gold. If the NKVD doesn’t miss its guess, I have there some of the same kind of stuff as the Lizards used to bomb Berlin and Washington.”

  That got a reaction, all right, “Wait a minute,” Yossel said slowly. “The Russians are letting you take this-this stuff to Germany? How does that happen?”

  Why don’t they keep it all themselves? he meant. “If they could have kept it all, they would have, I’m sure,” Jager answered, smiling. “But as I said, it was a joint German-Soviet combat group that won this material, and however much reason the Russians have to dislike us Germans, they know also our scientists are not to be despised. And so…” He slapped a saddlebag.

  Further colloquy, now almost entirely in Polish, among the Jews. Fmally Yossel said, “All right, German; if nothing else, you’ve confused us. Come along, you and your horse and whatever he’s carrying.”

  “You have to keep me out of the Lizards’ sight,” Jager insisted.

  Yossel laughed. “No, no, we just have to keep you from being noticed. It’s not the same thing at all. Get moving, we’ve already wasted too much time here on jabber.”

  The Jew proved to know what he was talking about. Over the next few days, Jager saw more Lizards at closer range than he ever had before. Not one even looked at him; they all assumed he was just another militiaman, and so to be tolerated.

  Encounters with armed Poles were more alarming. Although he’d grown a gray-streaked beard, Jager was ironically aware he looked not the least bit Jewish. “Don’t worry about it,” Yossel told him when he said as much. “They’ll think you’re just another traitor.”

  That stung. Jager said, “You mean the way the rest of the world thinks of you Polish Jews?” He’d been with the band long enough now to speak his mind without fearing someone would shoot him for it.

  “Yes, about like that,” Yossel answered calmly; he was hard to rile. “Of course, what the rest of the world still doesn’t believe is that we had good reason to like the Lizards better than you Nazis. If you know about Babi Yar, you know about that.”

  Since he did know about that, and didn’t like what he knew, Jager changed the subject. “Some of those Poles looked like they’d just as soon start shooting at us as not.”

  “They probably would. They don’t like Jews, either.” Yossel’s voice was matter-of-fact. “But they don’t dare, because the Lizards have given us enough in the way of weapons to hurt them bad if they play their old games with us.”

  Jager chewed on that for a while. The Jew frankly admitted his kind depended on the Lizards. Yet he’d had endless chances to betray Jager to them and hadn’t done it. lager admitted to himself that he didn’t understand what was going on. With luck, he’d find out.

  That evening, they came to a town bigger than most of the others through which they’d passed. “What’s the name of this place?” Jager asked.

  At first he thought Yossel sneezed. Then the Jew repeated himself: “Hrubieszow.” The town boasted cobblestone streets, three-story buildings with cast-iron awnings, and a central boulevard that had a median strip planted with trees, perhaps to achieve a Parisian effect. Having seen the real Paris, Jager found the imitation laughable, but kept that to himself.

  Yossel went up to one of the three-story buildings, spoke in Yiddish to the man who answered-his knock. He turned to Jager. “You go in here. Take your saddlebags with you. We’ll get your horse out of town-a strange animal that stays around is plenty to make people start asking questions.”

  Jager went in. The gray-haired Jew who stood aside to let him pass said, “Hello, friend. I’m Lejb. What shall I call you while you’re here?”

  “Ich heisse Heinrich Jager” Jager answered. He’d grown resigned to the looks of horror he got for speaking German, but it was his only fluent language-and, for better or worse, he was a German. He could hardly deny it. Stiffly, he said, “I hope my presence will not disturb you too much, sir.”

  “A Nazi-in my house. They want to put a Nazi-in my house?” Lejb was not talking to Jager. The German didn’t think he was talking to himself, either. Whom did that leave? God, maybe.

  As if wound into motion by a key, Lejb bustled over and shut the door. “Even a Nazi should not freeze-especially if I would freeze with him.” With what seemed a large effort of will, he made himself look at Jager. “Will you drink tea? And there’s potato soup in the pot if you want it.”

  “Yes, please. Thank you very much.” The tea was hot, the potato soup both hot and filling. Lejb insisted on giving Jager seconds; the Jew apparently could not force himself to be a poor host. But he would not eat with Jager; he waited until the German finished before feeding himself.

  That pattern persisted over the next two days. Jager noticed he got the same chipped bowl, the same cup, at every meal; he wondered if Lejb would throw them away once he’d left, along with his bedding and everything else he’d touched. He didn’t ask, for fear the Jew would tell him yes.

  Just when he started to wonder if Yossel and the rest of the Jewish fighters had forgotten about him, his first captor returned, again under cover of darkness. Yossel said, “Somebody here wants to see you, Nazi.” From him, unlike from Lejb, the word had somehow lost most of its sting, as if it were a label and nothing more.

  An unfamiliar Jew stepped into the living room of Lejb’s house. He was fair and thin and younger than Jager would have expected for someone obviously important enough to be sent for. He did not offer to shake hands. “So you’re the German with the interesting package, are you?” he said, speaking German himself rather than Yiddish.

  “Yes,” Jager said. “Who are you?”

  The newcomer smiled thinly. “Call me Mordechai.” By the way Yossel started in surprise, that might even have been his real name. Bravado, Jager thought. The more the German studied Mordechai, the more impressed he grew. Young, yes, but an officer all the way: those light eyes were hooded and alert, alive with calculation. If he’d worn German field-gray, he’d have had a colonel’s pips and his own regiment before he hit forty; Jager recognized the type. The Jews had themselves a hotshot here.

  The hotshot said, “I gather you’re a panzer soldier and that you’ve stolen something important to the Lizards. What I’ve heard from Yossel here is interesting, but it’s also secondhand. Tell it to me yourself, Jager.”

  “Just a minute,” Jager said. Yossel bristled, but Mordechai only grunted, waiting for him to go on. He did: “You Jews cooperate with the Lizards, yet now you seem ready to betray them. Show me I can trust you not to hand me straight over to them.”

  “If we wanted to do that, we could have done it already,” Mordechai pointed out. “As for how and why we work with the Lizards-hmm. Think of it like this. Back three winters ago, Russia swamped the Finns. When you Nazis invaded Russia, Finland was happy enough to ride on your c
oattails and take back its own. But do you think the Finns go around yelling ‘Heil Hitler!’ all day long?”

  “Mmm-maybe not,” Jager admitted. “And so?”

  “And so we helped the Lizards against you Nazis, but for our own reasons-survival, for instance-not theirs. We don’t have to love them. Now I’ve told my story, and more than you deserve. You tell yours.”

  Jager did. Mordechai interrupted every so often with sharp, probing questions. The German’s respect for him grew at every one. He’d figured the Jew would know something of war and especially partisan operations-he had him pegged for a high military official. But he hadn’t figured Mordechai would know so much about the loot he carried in his saddlebags; he soon realized the Jew, though he’d never seen the mud-encrusted chunks of metal; understood them better than he did himself.

  When Jager was through (he felt squeezed dry), Mordechai steepled his fingers and stared up at the ceiling. “You know, before this war started, I worried more about what Marx thought than about God,” he remarked. His speech grew more guttural; his vowels shifted so Jager had to think to follow him-he’d fallen out of German into Yiddish. He went on, “Ever since you Nazis shut me up in the ghetto and tried to starve me to death, I’ve had my doubts about the choice I made. Now I’m sure I was wrong.”

  “Why now in particular?” lager asked.

  “Because I would need to be the wisest rabbi who ever lived to decide whether I ought to help you Germans fight the Lizards with their own filthy weapons.”

  Yossel nodded vehemently. “I was thinking the same thing,” he said.

  Mordechai waved him to silence. “I wish this choice fell on someone besides me. All I wanted to be before the war was an engineer.” His gaze and Jager’s clashed, swordlike. “All I am now, thanks to you Germans, is a fighting man.”