In the Balance w-1

by Harry Turtledove

  The people-and aliens? — stopped just on the other side of the plasterboard barrier. Moishe’s eyes flicked to the candlesticks that held the Sabbath lights. These were of pottery, not silver like the one he’d given up for food. But they were heavy, and of a length to serve as bludgeons. I won’t go down without a fight, he promised himself.

  Someone rapped on the barrier. Russie grabbed for a candlestick, then caught himself: two knocks a pause, then another knock was the signal Anielewicz’s men used when they brought him supplies. But they’d just done that a couple of days before, and the bunker still held plenty. They seemed to have a schedule of sorts, and even though the signal was right, the timing wasn’t.

  Rivka knew that, too. “What do we do?” she mouthed silently.

  “I don’t know,” Moishe mouthed back. What he did know, though he didn’t want to dishearten his wife by saying so, was that if the Lizards were out there, they were going to take him. But the footsteps receded. Had he really heard skitterings after all?

  Rivka raised her voice to a whisper. “Are they gone?”

  “I don’t know,” Russie said again. After a moment, he added, “Let’s find out.” If the Lizards knew he was here, they didn’t need to wait for him to come out.

  He picked up a candlestick, lit candle still inside (the cellar was as dark as the bunker would have been without light), unbarred the door, took half a step forward so he could slide aside the plasterboard panel. No box of food sat in front of it… but an envelope lay on the cement floor. He scooped it up, replaced the concealing panel, and went back into his hidey-hole.

  “What is it?” Rivka asked when he was back inside.

  “A note or letter of some sort,” he answered, holding up the envelope. He tore it open, pulled out the folded sheet of paper inside, and held it close to the candlestick so he could see what it said. The one great curse of this underground life was never having either sunlight or electric light by which to read.

  The candle sufficed for something short, though. He unfolded the paper. On it was a neatly typed paragraph in Polish. He read the words aloud for Rivka’s benefit: “Just so you know, your latest message has been received elsewhere and widely circulated. Reaction is very much as we had hoped. Sympathy for us outside the area has increased, and certain parties would have red faces under other circumstances. They still would like to congratulate you for your wit. Suggest you let them continue to lavish their praises from a distance.”

  “That’s all?” Rivka asked when he was through. “No signature or anything?”

  “No,” he answered. “I can make a pretty good guess about who sent it, though, and I expect you can, too.”

  “Anielewicz,” she said.

  “That’s what I think,” Moishe agreed. The note had all the hallmarks of the Jewish fighting leader. No wonder it was in Polish: he’d been thoroughly secular before the war. Being typewritten made it harder to trace if it fell into the wrong hands. So did its elliptical phrasing: someone who didn’t know for whom it was intended would have trouble figuring out what it was supposed to mean. Anielewicz was careful every way he could think of. Moishe was sure he wouldn’t know how the note had got down to the bunker.

  Rivka said, “So the recording got abroad. Thank God for that. I wouldn’t want you known as the Lizards’ puppet.”

  “No; thank God I’m not.” Moishe started to laugh. “I’d like to see Zolraag with his face all red.” After what the Lizard governor had done to him, he wanted Zolraag both embarrassed and furious. From what the note said, he was getting his wish.

  One of the things with which the bunker had been stocked was a bottle of slivovitz. Till now, Moishe had ignored it. He pulled it off the high shelf where it sat, yanked out the cork, and poured two shots. Handing one glass to Rivka, he raised the other himself.

  “Confusion to the Lizards!” he said.

  They both sipped the plum brandy. Fire ran down Moishe’s throat. Rivka coughed several times. Then she lifted her glass. Quietly, she offered a toast of her own: “Freedom for our people, and even, one day, for us.”

  “Yes.” Moishe finished the slivovitz. One of the Sabbath candles went out, filling the bunker with the smell of hot tallow-and cutting the light inside almost in half. New shadows swooped.

  “The other one will go soon,” Rivka said, watching that flame approach the candlestick, too.

  “I know,” Moishe answered gloomily. Up where Reuven could not knock them over, two little oil lamps burned. But for being made out of tin, they probably weren’t much different from the ones the Maccabees had used when they took the Temple in Jerusalem away from Antiochus and his Greeks. The tiny amount of light they gave made Moishe think they were primitive, anyhow.

  He carefully refilled them all the same. Waking up in absolute blackness in the crowded little underground room was a nightmare he’d suffered only once. The dreadful groping search for a box of matches made him vow never to go through it again. He’d lived up to the vow so far.

  Reuven, Rivka, and he all shared one crowded bed. He gently rolled his son against the far wall. Reuven mumbled and thrashed, but didn’t wake up. Moishe got into bed next to him, held up the covers so Rivka could slide in, too.

  His hand brushed her hip as he let the blankets down over them. She turned toward him. The lamps gave just enough light to let him see the questioning look on her face. The touch had been as much an accident as a caress, but he drew her to him just the same. The questioning look turned to a smile.

  Later, they lay nestled together like spoons, her backside warm against the bottom of his belly. It was a gentle way to make love, and one not likely to disturb their son. Moishe stroked Rivka’s hair. She laughed quietly. “What’s funny?” he asked. He could hear sleepiness blur his voice.

  She laughed again. “We didn’t do-this-so much when we were first married.”

  “Well, maybe not,” he said. “I was just starting medical school and busy all the time, and then the baby came…”

  And now, he thought, what else is there to do? It’s too dark to read much, we’re both sleeping a lot-if we didn’t take our pleasure from each othet we’d be as cross as a couple of bears cooped up down here.

  He didn’t think saying he enjoyed Rivka’s body because there wasn’t anything else to do would endear him to her. Instead, he said with mock severity, “Most women, I hear, kvetch because their husbands don’t pay them enough attention. Are you complaintng because I pay you too much?”

  “I didn’t think I was complaintng.” She moved away from the edge of the bed, and against him. Pressed tight against her firm flesh, he felt himself begin to rise again. So did she. Without a word, she raised a leg enough to let him slip himself back into her. Her breath sighed out when he did.

  No hurry, he thought. We aren’t going anywhere. Unhurriedly, he tried to make the best of where they were.

  The door to Bobby Fiore’s cell hissed open. It wasn’t the usual time for food, as well as he could judge without any clock. He looked around hopefully. Maybe the Lizards were bringing in Liu Han.

  But no. It was only Lizards: the usual armed guards and another one, the latter with more elaborate body paint than the others. He’d figured out that was a mark of status among them, just as a man who wore a fancy suit was likely to be a bigger wheel than one in bib overalls and a straw hat.

  The Lizard with the expensive paint job said something in his own language, too fast for Fiore to follow. He said as much, I don’t understand being a phrase he’d found worth memorizing. The Lizard said, “Come-with,” in English.

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” Fiore answered, trotting out a couple of other stock phrases. He got to his feet and approached the Lizard-not too close, though, because he’d learned that made the guards anxious. He didn’t want anybody with a gun anxious about him.

  The guards fell in around him, all of them too far away for him to try grabbing one of those guns. He wasn’t feeling suicidal this morning-assuming it
was morning; only God and the Lizards knew for sure-so he didn’t try.

  When the Lizards took him to Liu Han’s cell, they turned right out the door. This time they turned left. He didn’t know whether to be curious or apprehensive, and finally settled for a little of each: heading someplace out of the ordinary might be dangerous, but it gave him the chance to see something new. After being cooped up so long with essentially nothing to see, that counted for a good deal.

  The trouble was, just because something was new didn’t necessarily make it exciting. Corridors remained corridors, their ceilings unpleasantly close to his head. Some were bare metal, others painted a flat off-white. The Lizards who passed him in those corridors paid him no more attention than he would have given a dog walking down the street. He wanted to shout at them, just to make them jump. But that would have made the guards jumpy, too, and maybe earned him a bullet in the ribs, so he didn’t.

  Peering through open doorways was more interesting. He tried to figure out what the Lizards in those rooms that weren’t cells were up to. Most of the time, he couldn’t. A lot of the aliens just sat in front of what looked like little movie screens. Fiore couldn’t see the pictures on them, just that they were in color: the bright squares stood out in the midst of silver and white.

  Then came something new: an oddly curved stairway. But as he descended it, Fiore discovered that while his eyes saw the curve, his feet couldn’t feel it, and when he got to the bottom, he seemed lighter than he had up at the top. He shifted his weight back and forth. No, he wasn’t imagining it.

  Boy, if I’d been this light on my feet, I’d’ve made the big leagues years ago, he thought. Then he shook his head. Maybe not. His bat had always been pretty light, too.

  The Lizards took the weird stairs and the change in weight utterly for granted. They hustled him along the corridors on this level, which didn’t seem any different from those up above. At last they took him into one of the rooms with the movie screens.

  The Lizard who’d ordered him out of his own cell spoke to the one who waited in there. That one had an even spiffier paint job than the alien who’d come in with the guards. Fiore couldn’t follow what the Lizards said as they talked back and forth, but he heard his own name several times. The Lizards massacred it worse than Liu Han did.

  The alien who’d been in the room. surprised him by speaking decent English: “You are the Tosevite male Bobby Fiore, the one mated to the female Liu Han in an exclusive”-the word came out as one long hiss-“arrangement?”

  “Yes, superior sir,” Fiore answered, also in English. He took a small chance by asking, “Who are you, superior sir?”

  The Lizard didn’t get mad. “I am Tessrek, senior psychologist.” More hisses there. Tessrek went on, “I seek to learn more about this-arrangement.”

  “What do you want to know?” Fiore wondered if the Lizards had figured out Liu Han was pregnant yet. He or she would have to spell things out pretty soon if they kept on being dumb about it.

  They knew more than he’d thought. Tessrek turned a knob on the desk behind which he was sitting. Out of thin air, Fiore heard himself saying, “Goddamn, who woulda thought my first kid would be half Chink?” Tessrek turned the knob again, then asked, “This mean the female Liu Han will lay eggs-no, will reproduce; you Big Uglies do not lay eggs-the female Liu Han will reproduce?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Fiore said.

  “This is as a result of your matings?” Tessrek twiddled with another knob. The little screen behind him, which had been a blank blue square, started showing a picture.

  Stag film, Fiore thought; he’d seen a few in his time. This one was in color good enough for Technicolor, not the grainy black-and-white typical of the breed. The color was what he noticed first; only half a heartbeat later did he realize the movie was of Liu Han and him.

  He took a step forward. He wanted to squeeze Tessrek’s neck until the Lizard’s strange eyes popped from his head. The murder on his face must have shown even to the guards, because a couple of them hissed a sharp warning and trained their weapons on his midsection. Reluctantly, every muscle screaming to go on, he checked himself.

  Tessrek seemed to have no notion of what had rattled his cage. The psychologist went on blithely, “This mating-this spawn, you would say-you and the female Liu Han will care for it?”

  “I guess so,” Bobby mumbled. Behind the Lizard, the dirty picture went on, Liu Han’s face slack with ecstasy, his own intent above her. In a distant way, he wondered how the Lizards managed to show a movie in a lighted room with no projector visible. He made himself come back to the question. “Yeah, that’s what we’ll do if you”-things-“let us.”

  “This will be what you Big Uglies call a-family?” Tessrek pronounced the word with extra care, to make sure Fiore understood him.

  “Yeah,” he answered, “a family.” He tried to look away from the screen, toward the Lizard, but his eyes kept sliding back. Some of his embarrassed anger spilled over into words: “What’s the matter, don’t you Lizards have families of your own? You gotta come to Earth to poke your snouts into ours?”

  “No, we have none,” Tessrek said, “not in your sense of word. With us, females lay eggs, raise hatchlings, males do other things.”

  Fiore gaped at him. More than his surroundings, more than the shamelessness with which the Lizards had filmed his lovemaking, the simple admission brought home how alien the invaders were. Men might build spaceships one day (Sam Yeager had read about that rockets-to-Mars stuff all the time; Bobby wondered if his roommate was still alive). Plenty of men were shameless, starting with Peeping Tom. But not knowing what a family was…

  Oblivious to the turmioil he’d created, Tessrek went on, “The Race needs to learn how you Big Uglies live, so we rule you better, easier. Need to understand to-how do you say? — to control, that that word I want?”

  “Yeah, that’s it, all right,” Fiore said dully. Guinea pig ran through his head, again and again. He’d had that thought before, but never so strong. The Lizards didn’t care that he knew they were experimenting with him; what could he do about it? To them, he was just an animal in a cage. He wondered what guinea pigs thought of the scientists who worked on them. If it was nothing good, he couldn’t blame them.

  “When will the hatchling come out?” Tessrek asked.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Fiore answered. “It takes nine months, but I don’t know how long it’s been since she caught. How am I supposed to tell you? You don’t even turn off the lights in my room.”

  “Nine-months?” Tessrek fiddled with something on his desk. The dirty movie disappeared from the screen behind him, to be replaced by Lizard squiggles. Those changed as he did more fiddling. He turned one of his eye turrets back toward them. “This would be one and one-half years of the Race? One year of the Race, I tell you, is half a Tosev year, more or less.”

  Bobby Fiore hadn’t juggled fractions in his head since high school. The trouble he’d had with them then had helped convince him he’d be better off playing ball for a living. He needed some painful mental work before he finally nodded. “Yeah, I think that’s right, superior sir.”

  “Sstrange.” Another word Tessrek turned into a hiss. “You Big Uglies take so long to give birth to your hatchlings. Why is this?”

  “How the devil should I know?” Fiore answered; again he had the feeling of taking a test he hadn’t studied for. “It’s just the way we are. I’m not lying, superior sir. You can check that one with anybody.”

  “Check? This means confirm? Yes, I do that.” The Lizard psychologist spoke Lizard talk into what looked like a little microphone. Different squiggles went up on the screen. Fiore wondered if it was somehow writing down what Tessrek said. Hell of a gadget if it could do that, he thought. The Lizard went on, “I do not think you lie. What is the advantage to you on this question? But I wonder why you Tosevites are so, not like Race and other species of the Empire.”

  “You oughta talk to a scientist or a doctor or somebod
y.” Fiore scratched his head. “You say you Lizards lay eggs?”

  “Of course.” By his tone, Tessrek implied that was the only thing a right-thinking creature could possibly do.

  Bobby thought back to the chickens that had squawked and clucked in a little coop behind his folks’ house in Pittsburgh. Without those chickens and their eggs, he and his brothers and sisters would have gone hungry a lot more than they did, but that wasn’t why they came to mind now. He said, “An egg can’t get any bigger once you lay it. When the chick inside-or I guess the baby Lizard, too-is too big for the eggshell to hold it any more, it has to come out. But a baby inside a woman has more room to grow.”

  Tessrek brought both eyes to bear on him. He’d learned a Lizard did that only when you’d managed to get its full attention (he’d also learned its full attention wasn’t always something you Wanted to have). The psychologist said, “This may be worth more study.” He made it sound like an accolade.

  He leaned close to the microphone, went back into his language. Again, the screen showed fresh Lizard writing. It really was a note-taker, Fiore realized. He wondered what else it could do-besides showing movies that should never have been made.

  Tessrek said, “You Big Uglies are of the kind of Tosevite creature where the female feeds the hatchling with a fluid that comes out of her body?” It wasn’t exactly a question, even though he made the interrogative noise at the end: he already knew the answer.

  Bobby Fiore had to take a mental step backward and work out what the Lizard was talking about. After a second, the light bulb went on. “With milk, you mean, superior sir? Yeah, we feed babies milk.” He’d been a bottle baby himself, not nursed, but he didn’t complicate the issue. Besides, what had the bottle held?

  “Milk. Yes.” Now Tessrek sounded as if Bobby had admitted humans picked their noses and fed babies on boogers, or else like a fastidious clubwoman who for some reason had to talk about syphilis. He paused, pulled himself together. “Only the females do this, am I correct? Not the males?”