In the Balance w-1

by Harry Turtledove

  “Heil Hitler!” the Luftwaffe man answered, which did nothing to make her happier about working with Germans.

  When she and Molotov went dip-clopping out to the airstrip next morning, she discovered the German ground crew had daubed the U-2’s wings and fuselage with splotches of whitewash. One of the fellows in overalls said, “Now you’ll look more like snow and rocks.”

  Soviet winter camouflage was more thoroughly white, but snow drifted more evenly across the steppe than it did in mountains. She didn’t know how much the whitewash would help, but supposed it couldn’t hurt. The groundcrew man grinned as she thanked him in her accented German.

  When she got a good look at the mountains toward which she was flying, she was glad she’d taken the Luftwaffe officer’s advice and not tried to make the trip by night. The landing field to which she was ordered lay not far outside the village of Berchtesgaden. When she set the Kukuruznik down there, she assumed Hitler’s residence lay within the village.

  Instead, a long wagon ride up the side of the mountain-Obersalzberg, she learned it was called-followed. Molotov sat staring stonily straight ahead the whole way up. He said nothing much. Whatever went on behind the mask of his face, he kept it there. He glared right through the soldiers at two checkpoints, ignored the barbed wire that ringed the compound.

  Hitler’s Berghof, when the wagon finally reached it, reminded Ludmila of a pleasant little resort house (the view was magnificent) swallowed up by a residence that met the demands of a world leader. Molotov was whisked away into the Berghof; Ludmila thought she recognized his German counterpart, von Ribbentrop, from newsreels during the strange couple of years when the Soviet Union and Germany held to their friendship treaty.

  She wasn’t important enough to be lodged in the Berghof. The Germans escorted her over to a guesthouse not far away. As she stood in the splendid lobby, all she could think was how many workers and peasants had had their labor exploited to create it. She was primly certain no one in the classless Soviet Union cared to live in such unnecessary splendor.

  Down the staircase came an officer in the natty black uniform and beret of the German panzer formations: a colonel, by the two pips on each braided shoulder strap. On his right breast he wore a large, garish eight-pointed gold star with a swastika in the center. He was lean and perfectly shaved and looked quite at home here close by his Fuhrer; just watching his smooth stride made Ludmila feel short, and dumpy and out of place. She swung the knapsack that held her few belongings over one shoulder.

  The motion drew the natty colonel’s eye. He stopped, stared, then hurried across the parquet floor to her. “Ludmila!” he exclaimed, and went on in fair Russian: “What the devil are you doing here?”

  She recognized his voice even if she hadn’t known his face. “Heinrich!” she said, trying hard not to pronounce it with an initial g as Russians often did. She was so glad to find someone she knew that, heedless equally of startled looks from her German escorts and, of what Molotov would think when the news got back to han, she gave Jager a hug he enthusiastically returned. “You’ve been promoted two grades,” she observed. “That’s wonderful.”

  His grin was self-deprecating. “They offered me a choice: lieutenant colonel and the Knight’s Cross or colonel and just Hitler’s fried egg here.” He patted the gaudy medal. “Excuse me, the German Cross in gold. They thought I’d take glory. I took rank. Rank lasts.

  “Hitler’s fried egg?” Ludmila echoed in delicious amazement. She noticed her escorts were ostentatiously pretending they hadn’t noticed that. She shook her head. “My, we’ll have a lot to talk about.”

  “Yes we will.” For a moment Jager’s face assumed the watchful expression she’d first seen at the Ukraiman kolkhoz. Then the smile came back. “Yes, we will,” he repeated. “Quite a lot.”

  18

  Atvar stared out at the assembled shiplords. They silently stared back. He tried to gauge their mood before he called the meeting to order. Nothing short of mutiny-maybe not even that-would have surprised him. Well past one of the Race’s years into a campaign expected to be a walkover, no one had yet turned one eye turret, let alone two, toward victory.

  The fleetlord decided to confront that head-on: “Assembled males, I know we face new problems almost every day on Tosev 3. Sometimes we are even forced to face old problems over again, as in the Tosevite empire called Italia.”

  The shiplord Straha stood, crouched, and waited to be recognized. When Atvar pointed to him, he asked, “How did the Deutsche manage to kidnap what’s-his-name-the Big Ugly in charge of Italia-”

  “Mussolini,” Atvar supplied.

  “Thank you, Exalted Fleetlord. Yes, Mussolini. How did the Deutsche manage to steal him when we shut him up in that castle away from everything after he had surrendered his empire to us?”

  “How they learned where he was, we do not know,” Atvar admitted. “They are skilled at such irregular warfare, and I must concede the move has embarrassed us.”

  “Embarrassed us? I should say so.” Straha added an emphatic cough. “His radio broadcasts from Deutschland negate much of the value we got from that Big Ugly from Warsaw, the one who spoke so convincingly against the Deutsche.”

  “Russie,” Atvar said after a quick glance at a tickler file on the computer screen in front of him. The file also told him something else: “We’d reached the point of diminishing returns with that one in any case. His last statement had to be electronically altered to make it conform to our requirements.”

  “The Big Uglies have not yet adjusted themselves to the idea that the Race will rule over them,” the shiplord Kirel said mournfully.

  “And why should they?” Straha retorted, his voice dripping sarcasm. “As far as I can see, they have no reason to. This affair with Mussolini is but one more embarrassment in a long series. Now Italia seethes with sabotage, where before it was among the calmest of the empires under our control”

  Feneress, a male of Straha’s faction, chimed in, “Moreover, it lets the Deutsche make a folk hero of this”-he checked his own computer for the name he sought-“this Skorzeny who led the raid, and encourages other Tosevites to try to emulate his feat.”

  Kirel started to come to Atvar’s defense, but the fleetlord held up a hand. “What you say is true, Feneress,” he replied. “For his failure, the male in charge of the Big Ugly Mussolini’s security would normally have found himself liable to severe disciplinary action. As, however, he perished in the Tosevite raid, this has become impracticable.”

  The assembled shiplords stirred and murmured among themselves. For the fleetlord to admit failure so frankly was strange and untoward. No wonder they murmured they had to be trymg to figure out what Atvar’s concession meant Did it signal a change in strategy? Did it mean Atvar would resign his post perhaps in favor of Straha? If so, what did that imply for each shiplord?

  Atvar raised his hand again. Slowly, the murmurs died away. The fleetlord said, “I did not summon you to the bannership to dwell on failure, assembled shiplords. On the contrary. I summoned you here to outline a course which, I believe, will give us victory.”

  The officers stirred and murmured all over again. Some of them, Atvar knew, had begun to despair of victory. Others still thought it could be attained, but the means they wanted to use would leave Tosev 3 a ruin unfit for settlement by the colonization fleet now traveling across interstellar space toward the planet. If he could prove them wrong and still make the Big Uglies submit, Atvar would be ahead indeed. And he thought he could.

  He said, “We have been discomfited by the disturbingly advanced technology the Tosevites have demonstrated. Were it not for those advances-those causes we are still investigating-the conquest of Tosev 3 would have been routine.”

  “And we all would have been a lot happier,” Kirel put in. Atvar saw shiplords’ mouths fall open. That they could still laugh was a good sign.

  “We have been perhaps slower than we should in appreciating the implications of the Big Uglies�
� technology,” the fleetlord said. “Compared to the Tosevites, the Race is slow. They have used that fact to their advantage against us. But we are also thorough. Compare our Empire, the Empire, to the ephemeral makeshift empires and irrational administrative schemes under which they live. And now we have found a flaw in their technology which we hope we can exploit.”

  He’d grabbed their attention. By the way they stared hungrily at him, he might have been some powdered ginger in front of a crowd of addicts. (He made himself put that problem out of his mind for now. He had to dwell on advantages, not problems.) He said, “Our vehicles and aircraft are fueled by hydrogen and oxygen produced electrolytically from water with energy from the atomic engines of our starships. Getting all the fuel we need has never been a problem-if Tosev 3 possesses anything in excess, it is water. And, perhaps not surprisingly, we have evaluated the Big Uglies’ capabilities in terms of our own. This evaluation has proved erroneous.”

  The shiplords murmured yet again. High-ranking members of the Race were usually less candid about admitting error, especially when it reflected discredit on them. Atvar would also have been less candid than he was, had the advantage he gained here not outweighed the damage he suffered for acknowledging previous wrong.

  “Instead of hydrogen and oxygen, Tosevite aircraft and ground and sea vehicles run on one distillate of petroleum or another,” he said. “This has disadvantages, not least among them the noxious fumes such vehicles emit while operating.”

  “That’s true, by the Emperor,” Straha said. “Go into one of the cities that we rule and your nictitating membranes will sizzle from all the garbage in the air.”

  “Indeed,” Atvar said. “Pollutants aside, however, our engineers assure me there is no reason for petroleum-based engines to be less efficient than our own. In fact, they may even have certain minor advantages: because their fuels are liquids at ordinary temperatures, they don’t require the extensive insulation around our vehicles’ hydrogen tanks, and thus save weight.”

  Kirel said, “Still, it is criminal to waste petroleum by simply burning it when it may be put to so many more advantageous uses.”

  “Truth. When the conquest is complete, we shall phase out this profligate technology,” Atvar said. “I might note, however, that our geologists believe Tosev 3 has more petroleum than any of the Empire’s other planets, perhaps more than all three put together, in part due to its anomalously large percentage of water surface area. But this takes us away from the point on account of which I summoned today’s assembly.”

  “What is that point?” Three shiplords said it together. In other circumstances, the blunt question would, have come perilously close to insubordination. Now, though, Atvar was willing to forgive it.

  “The point, assembled males, is that even on Tosev 3 petroleum is, as the shiplord Kirel said, a precious and relatively uncommon commodity,” the fleetlord answered. “It is not found worldwide. The empire, or rather the not-empire, of Deutschland, for example, has but one primary source of petroleum, that being in the subordinate empire called Romania.” He used a hologram to show the shiplords where Romania lay, and where inside its boundaries sat the underground petroleum pool.

  “A question, Exalted Fleetlord?” called Shonar, a male of Kirel’s faction. He waited for Atvar to recognize him, then said, “Shall we be required to occupy the petroleum-producing regions not already under our control? That could prove expensive in terms of both males and munitions.”

  “It will not be necessary,” Atvar declared. “In some instances, we need not even attack the areas where petroleum comes from the ground. As I noted before, the Big Uglies burn not just petroleum in their vehicles, but rather distillates of petroleum. The facilities which produce those distillates are large and prominent. Identify and destroy them and we have destroyed the Tosevites’ ability to resist. Is this clear?”

  By the excited hisses and squeaks that came from the assembled shiplords, it was. Atvar wished the Race had found this strategy as soon as the conquest began. Wish as he would, though, he could not blame anyone too severely: Tosev 3 was simply so different from what the Race had expected to find that his technical staff had needed a while to figure out what was important and what wasn’t. Now-he hoped-they had.

  “By a year from now,” he said, “Tosev 3 shall be under our claws.” The males in the conference chamber gobbled and hooted. The Race’s applause filled Atvar with a warm glow of pride. He might yet go down in the annals of his people as Atvar the Conqueror, subduer of Tosev 3.

  The shiplords took up a chant: “May it be so! May it be so!” At first, Atvar took that as an expression of confident expectation. After a moment, though, he realized it could also have another meaning: if the Race hadn’t conquered the Big Uglies within the coming year, how much trouble would it face by that year’s end?

  Grinding through the air high above the Isle of Wight, George Bagnall thought he could see forever. The day was, for once, brilliantly clear. As the Lancaster wheeled through another of its patrol circuits, the English Channel, France across it, and England were in turn spread out before him like successive examples of the cartographer’s craft.

  “Wonder how they ever made maps and got the shapes right back before they could fly over them and see the way they were supposed to look,” he said.

  In the pilot’s seat beside him, Ken Embry grunted. “I wonder what it looks like to the Lizards. They get up high enough to take in the whole world at a glance.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” the flight engineer said. “It would be something to see, wouldn’t it?” He was filled with sudden anger that the Lizards had a privilege denied mankind. Under the anger, he realized, lay pure and simple envy.

  “We’ll just have to make the best of what we’ve got.” Embry leaned forward against the restraint of his belts, pointed down toward the gray-blue waters of the Channel. “What do you make of that ship, for instance?”

  “What do you think I am, a bloody spotter?” But Bagnall leaned forward, too. “It’s a submarine, by God,” he said in surprise. “Submarine on the surface in the Channel… one of ours?”

  “I’d bet it is,” Embry said. “Lizards or no Lizards, somehow I don’t think Winnie is dead keen on having U-boats slide past the skirts of the home islands.”

  “Can’t blame him for that.” Bagnall took another look. “Westbound,” he observed. “Wonder if it’s carrying something interesting for the Yanks.”

  “There’s a thought. Lizards aren’t much when it comes to sea business, are they? I expect a sub’d be all the harder for them to take out.” Embry leaned forward once more himself. “A bit of fun to guess, eh? Most days we’d be all swaddled in cotton batting up here and not,have the sport of it.”

  “That’s true enough.” Now Bagnall twisted around in his chair to peer back into the bomb bay-which for some time had housed no bombs. “Most days Goldfarb has a better view of the world than we do. Radar cares nothing for clouds: it peers right through them.”

  “So it does,” Embry. said. “On the other band, given the choice of jobs, I’d sooner peep out through the Perspex on a scene like this-or even on the usual clouds, come to that-than be stuck in the bowels of the aircraft watching electrons chase themselves.”

  “You get no arguments from me,” Bagnall said. “None whatevet But then, I dare say Goldfarb’s a bit of a queer bird all the way around. Fancy spending so long mooning after that barmaid Sylvia, finally getting her, and then throwing her aside bare days later.”

  The pilot laughed goatishly. “Maybe she wasn’t as good as he’d hoped.”

  “I doubt that.” Bagnall spoke from experience. “Never a dull moment there.”

  “I’d have thought as much from her looks, but one can’t always judge by looks, enjoyable as it may be to try.” Embry shrugged. “Well, it’s not my affair, in either the literal or figurative sense of the word, and just as well, too. Speaking of Goldfarb, however…” He flicked the intercom switch. “Any sign
of our scaly little chums, Radarman?”

  “No, sir,” Goldfarb said. “Dead quiet here.”

  “Dead quiet,” Embry repeated. “Do you know, I quite like the ring of that?”

  “Yes, rather,” Bagnall said. “One more mission from which we have some reasonable hope of landing? The flight engineer chuckled, “We’ve been living so long on borrowed time by now that I sometimes entertain hopes we shan’t have to repay it one day.”

  “Disabuse yourselves of those, my friend. The day they took the limit off the number of missions an aircrew could be ordered to fly, they signed our death warrants, and no mistake. The trick lies in evading the inevitable as long as one can.”

  “After you got us down safe in France, I refuse to believe anything is impossible,” Bagnall said.

  “I was at least as surprised at surviving that as you, believe me: nothing like a bit of luck, what?” Embry laughed. “But if the Lizards choose not to stir about for another couple of hours, I concede we shall have had an easy time of it today. We are orcasionally entitled to one such, don’t you think?”

  The Lizards did stay quiet. At the appointed hour, Embry gratefully swung the Lanc back toward Dover. The return descent and landing were so smooth that the pilot said, “Thank you for flying BOAC today,” as the bulky bomber rolled to a stop. No commercial passengers, however, ever deplaned so rapidly as the men who flew with him.

  As Bagnall scrambled out of the cockpit and down onto the tarmac, one of the groundcrew men gave him a cheeky grin.

  “ ’Ere, you must’ve heard they’ve got the power on again, you’re out an’ ’eadin’ for the barracks so quick.”

  “Have they?” The flight engineer stepped up his pace from quick to double-quick. All sorts of delightful visions danced in his head: light by which to read or play cards, an electric fire, a working hotplate on which to brew tea or heat water for a proper shave, a phonograph that spun… the possibilities seemed to stretch as far as the horizon had up in the Lancaster.