Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  With a deliberate effort of will, Teerts made himself not think about the fiasco Britain had become. But when his eye turrets swiveled in his head to let him look over the air base, he found nothing to cheer him here, either.

  When the Race first came to Tosev 3, it had let its aircraft rest openly on their strips, confident the Big Uglies could not reach them. Now Teerts’ killercraft, like those of his comrades—by the Emperor, like those of the Big Uglies!—huddled in earthen revetments. Antiaircraft-missile emplacements still ringed the base, but they were short of missiles. A good thing the Big Uglies don’t know how short we are, Teerts thought. Sooner or later, though, they’d find out. They had a knack for that. They’d spent so much time and effort spying on one another that, low technology or not, they found ways to figure out what the Race was doing.

  To try to make up for the missile shortage, technicians had slaved Français antiaircraft cannon to radars provided by the Race. That made the guns far more accurate than they’d been before, but still left them without either the range or the killing power the missiles had had. And the Big Uglies would eventually notice the cannons, and, worse, figure out why they were emplaced. When they did, the revetments would start paying for themselves.

  The debriefing room lay not far from the edge of the air base. Teerts watched a couple of Tosevites shambling along the road that passed by the base. Even by the low standards the Big Uglies set for themselves, these were travel-worn specimens, their clothes (even they needed protection against their home planet’s wretched weather) dirty and stained, their hides grimy. One of them, the bigger one, must have seen war or other misfortune somewhere, for a long scar furrowed one side of his face.

  In Teerts’ mind, that just made the Big Ugly uglier. Plastic surgery techniques on Tosev 3 were as backwards as the other arts on the planet, which struck Teerts as a shame, since Tosev 3 offered the unwary so many chances to maim and disfigure themselves. The Race was used to machines and systems that always worked and never hurt anybody. The Big Uglies just wanted results, and didn’t much care how they got them.

  Teerts understood that better than he would have before he came to Tosev 3, or, to be specific, before the Nipponese captured him. He felt the same restless craving for ginger as the Big Uglies did for everything in their lives. He wanted a taste, he wanted it now, and, as long as he got it, nothing else mattered to him.

  Getting it wasn’t hard, either. Many of the groundcrew males had been here since the Race seized the air base. They’d had plenty of time to make connections with Tosevites who could supply what they needed. Teerts had feared only the Nipponese knew about the herb to which they’d addicted him, but it seemed almost weed-common all over Tosev 3.

  And, to the Big Uglies, it was nothing more than a condiment. Teerts’ mouth fell open. What irony! The Tosevites were biologically incapable of appreciating far and away the best thing their miserable planet produced.

  He spied a fuel specialist and stepped out into the male’s path. “How may I help you, superior sir?” the specialist asked. His words were all they should have been, but his tone was knowing, cynical.

  “My engines could use a cleaning additive, I think,” Teerts answered. The code was clumsy, but worked well enough that, by all accounts, no one here had got in trouble for using ginger. There were horror stories of whole bases closed down and personnel sent to punishment. When ginger-users got caught, those who caught them were disinclined to mercy.

  “Think you’ve got some contaminants in your hydrogen line, do you, superior sir?” the specialist asked. “Well, computer analysis should be able to tell whether you’re right or wrong. Come with me; we’ll check it out.”

  The terminal to which the fuel specialist led Teerts was networked to all the others at the air base, and to a mainframe in one of the starships that had landed in southern France. The code the specialist punched into it had nothing to do with fuel analysis. It went somewhere into the accounting section of the mainframe.

  “How far out of spec are your engines performing?” the male asked.

  “At least thirty percent,” Teerts answered. He keyed the figure into the computer. It unobtrusively arranged for him to transfer thirty percent of his last pay period’s income to the fuel specialist’s account. No one had ever asked questions about such transactions, not at this air base. Teerts suspected that meant a real live male in the accounting department was suppressing fund transfer data to make sure no one asked questions. He wondered whether the male got paid off in money or in ginger. He knew which he would rather have had.

  “There you are, superior sir. See? Analysis shows your problem’s not too serious,” the fuel specialist said, continuing the charade. “But here’s your additive, just in case.” He shut down the terminal, reached into a pouch on his belt, and passed Teerts several small plastic vials filled with brownish powder.

  “Ah. Thank you very much.” Teerts stowed them in one of his own pouches. As soon as he got some privacy, this cold, wet mudball of a planet would have the chance to redeem itself.

  Walking with Friedrich through the streets of Lodz made Mordechai Anielewicz feel he was walking alongside a beast of prey that had developed a taste for human flesh and might turn on him at any moment The comparison wasn’t altogether accurate, but it wasn’t altogether wrong, either. He didn’t know what Friedrich had done in the war, or in the time between the German conquest of Poland and the invasion of the Lizards.

  Whatever he’d done, Friedrich had sense enough to keep his mouth shut now, even with Jews swarming all about him. The Lodz ghetto wasn’t as large as Warsaw’s, but it was just as crowded and just as hungry. Next to what the ghettos had endured in Nazi times, what they had now was abundance; next to abundance, what they had now wasn’t much.

  Anielewicz scowled at the posters of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski that stared down from every blank wall in the ghetto. Some of the posters were old and faded and peeling; others looked to have been put up yesterday. Rumkowski had run things here under the Nazis, and by all appearances was still running them under the Lizards. Mordechai wondered how exactly he’d managed that.

  Friedrich noticed the posters, too. “Give that old bastard hair and a little mustache and he could be Hitler,” he remarked, glancing slyly over at Anielewicz. “How does that make you feel, Shmuel?”

  Even now, surrounded by Jews, he didn’t leave off his baiting. Neither did Anielewicz. It wasn’t particularly vicious; it was the sort of teasing two workmen who favored rival football clubs might have exchanged. “Sick,” Mordechai answered. That was true, for before the war he’d never imagined the Jews could produce their own vest-pocket Hitlers. But he wouldn’t give Friedrich the pleasure of knowing he was irked, so he added, “Hitler’s a much uglier man.” As far as he was concerned, that was so both literally and metaphorically.

  “Ah, rubbish,” Friedrich said, planting a playful elbow in his ribs. One of these days, the Nazi would do that once too often, and then something dramatic would happen. He hadn’t done it quite often enough for that, not yet.

  Something dramatic happened anyhow. A Jew in a cloth cap and a long black coat stopped in the middle of Lutomierska Street and stared at Friedrich. The Jew had a wide, ugly scar across the right side of his face, as if a bullet had creased him there.

  He walked up to Anielewicz, waggled a forefinger in front of his nose. “Are you a Jew?” he demanded in Yiddish.

  “Yes, I’m a Jew,” Mordechai answered in the same language. He understood why the newcomer sounded a little uncertain. Even with the light brown beard on his cheeks, he looked more like a Pole than the swarthy, hook-nosed stereotype of a Jew.

  “You are a Jew!” The newcomer clapped a hand to his forehead, almost knocking the cap from his head. He pointed at Friedrich. “Do you know whom you’re walking with? Do you know what you’re walking with?” His hand quivered.

  “I know that if there’s a fire, the engine is going to come out of there and smash us flat as a cou
ple of latkes,” Anielewicz answered, nodding over toward the fire station in front of which they stood. The ghetto fire engine still had petrol. As far as he knew, it was the only vehicle in the Jewish quarter of Lodz that did. He gently took the Jew by the elbow. “Come on, let’s go over on the sidewalk.” He gathered in Friedrich with his eyes. “You come, too.”

  “Where else would I go?” Friedrich said, his voice easy, amused. It was not an idle question. A lot of the young men on the street had rifles slung over their shoulders. If he ran, a shout of “Nazi!” would surely get him caught, and likely get him shot.

  The Jew with the scarred cheek seemed ready to give that shout, too. His features working, he repeated, “Do you know what you’re walking with, you who say you are a Jew?”

  “Yes, I know he’s a German,” Mordechai answered. “We were in a partisan band together. He may have been a Nazi soldier, but he’s a good fighting man. He’s given the Lizards many a kick in the arse.”

  “With a German, you might be a friend. With a Nazi, even, you might be a friend,” the Jew answered. “The world is a strange place, that I should say such a thing. But with a murderer of his kind—” He spat at Friedrich’s feet.

  “I said I was his comrade. I did not say I was his friend,” Anielewicz replied. The distinction sounded picayune even to him. He stared at Friedrich with a sudden, horrid suspicion. A lot of men in the partisan band had been reticent about just what they’d done before they joined it. He’d been reticent himself, when you got down to it. But a German could have some particularly good reasons for wanting to keep his mouth shut.

  “His comrade.” Now the Jew spat between Mordechai’s feet. “Listen to me, comrade.” He freighted the word with the hate and scorn a Biblical prophet might have used. “My name is Pinchas Silberman. I am—I was—a greengrocer in Lipno. Unless you are from there, you would never have heard of it: it is a little town north of here. It had a few Jews—fifty, maybe, not a hundred. We got on well enough with our Polish neighbors.”

  Silberman paused to glare at Friedrich. “One day, after the Germans conquered Poland, in came a—platoon, is that what you call it?—of a police battalion. They gathered us up, men and women and children—me, my Yetta, Aaron, Yossel, and little Golda—and they marched us into the woods. He, your precious comrade, he was one of them. I shall take his face to the grave with me.”

  “Were you ever in Lipno?” Anielewicz asked Friedrich.

  “I don’t know,” the German answered indifferently. “I’ve been in a lot of little Polish towns.”

  Silberman’s voice went shrill: “Hear the angel of death! ‘I’ve been in a lot of little Polish towns,’ he says. No doubt he was, and left not a Jew alive behind him, except by accident. Me, I was an accident. He shot my wife, he shot my daughter in her arms, he shot my boys, and then he shot me. I had a great bloody head wound”—he brought a hand up to his face—“so he and the rest of the murderers must have thought I was dead along with my family, along with all the others. They went away. I got up and I walked to Plock, which is a bigger town not far from Lipno. I was half healed before the Germans emptied out Plock. They didn’t shoot everyone there. Some, the able-bodied, they shipped here to Lodz to work—to slave—for them. I was one of those. Now God is kind, and I can have my revenge.”

  “Police battalion?” Anielewicz stared at Friedrich with undisguised loathing. The German had always acted like a soldier. He’d fought as well as any soldier, and Anielewicz had assumed he’d been a Wehrmacht man. That was bad enough, but he’d heard of and even known a few decent Wehrmacht men even before the Lizards came. A lot of them were soldiers like any other country’s, just doing their jobs. But the men in the police battalions—

  The most you could give them was that they didn’t always kill all the Jews in the towns and villages they visited. As Silberman had said, some they drafted into slave labor instead. And he’d fought beside Friedrich, slept beside him, shared food with him, escaped from the prison camp with him. He felt sick.

  “What can you say for yourself?” he demanded. Because he’d done all those things with Friedrich—and because he was, in part, alive thanks to the German—he hesitated to shout for one of those armed Jews right away. He was willing, at least, to hear how the German defended himself.

  Friedrich shrugged. “Shall I tell you I’m sorry? Would it do me any good?” He shrugged again; he hadn’t intended that second question to be taken seriously. After a moment, he went on, “I’m not particularly sorry. I did what my officers told me to do. They said you Jews were enemies of the Reich and needed eliminating just like our other enemies. And so—” Yet another shrug.

  Anielewicz had heard that same argument from Nazis the Jews had captured when they helped the Lizards drive the Germans out of Warsaw. Before he could say anything, Pinchas Silberman hissed, “My Yetta, my boys, my baby—these were enemies? They were going to hurt you Nazi bastards?” He tried to spit in Friedrich’s face, but missed. The spittle slid slowly down the brick wall of the fire station.

  “Answer him!” Anielewicz barked when Friedrich kept silent for a moment.

  “Jawohl, Herr Generalfeldmarschall!” Friedrich said, clicking his heels with exquisite irony. “You have me. You will do as you like with me, just as I did as I liked before. When England dropped bombs on us and blew up our women and children, they thought those women and children were enemies. And, before you start shouting at me, when we dropped bombs on the English, we did the same thing, ja. How does that make me any different from a bomber, except I did it retail with a rifle instead of wholesale with a bombing plane?”

  “But the Jews you murdered had never done anything to you,” Mordechai said. He’d run into that peculiar German blind spot before, too. “Parts of Poland used to be Germany, and some of the Jews here fought for the Kaiser in the last war. What kind of sense does it make to go slaughtering them now?”

  “My officers said they were enemies. If I hadn’t treated them as enemies, who knows what would have happened to me?” Friedrich said. “And let me ask you another question, Shmuel—if you could make a giant omelet out of all the Lizards’ eggs, would you do it so they’d never trouble us again?”

  “A Nazi tzaddik we don’t need,” Silberman said. “Answer me this, Nazi schmuck—what would you do if you found the man who’d killed your wife and children? What would you do if you found him and he didn’t even remember doing it?”

  “I’d kill the motherfucker,” Friedrich answered. “But I’m just a Nazi bastard, so what the devil do I know?”

  Silberman looked at Mordechai. “Out of his own mouth you heard it. He puts the noose around his neck—and if he didn’t, I would.”

  Friedrich looked at him, too, as if to say, We fought together, and now you’re going to kill me? You already knew part of what I was a long time ago. How much were you pretending so we didn’t go for each other’s throats?

  Anielewicz sighed. “Friedrich, I think we’d better go over to the Balut Market square.” The square didn’t hold the market alone; the administration offices for the Lodz ghetto were there, too. Some of the Jewish fighting men there would know Mordechai was not Shmuel, a simple partisan. With some of those who knew who he really was, that would work to his advantage. Others, though, might be inclined to reveal his true name to Chaim Rumkowski—or to the Lizards.

  “So you’re going to tell them to hang me, too, eh?” Friedrich said.

  “No,” Anielewicz said slowly. Pinchas Silberman let out an outraged howl. Ignoring it, Mordechai went on, “Silberman here will tell what you did before the Lizards came. I’ll tell what you’ve done since, or what I know of it. It should tilt the balance toward—”

  Friedrich laughed in his face. “You Jews took it when you were on the bottom. You think I believe you won’t give it now that you’re on top?”

  “We believe in something you Nazis never heard of,” Anielewicz answered. “It’s called justice.”

  “It’s called Scheisse, is
what it’s called,” Friedrich said. “So in the name of justice, you’re going to—” In the middle of the sentence, without shifting either his eyes or his feet to give warning, he hit Anielewicz in the belly and ran.

  “Oof!” Mordechai said, and folded up like a concertina. Shlemiel, he thought as he gasped for air his lungs didn’t want to give him. Friedrich might have started out in a police battalion, but he’d picked up a real soldier’s skills from somewhere—and a partisan’s, as well. Not letting your foe know what you were about to do until you did it ranked high on both lists.

  But the German, who knew Anielewicz was dangerous, had not reckoned that Pinchas Silberman might be, too. The Jew from Lipno dashed after him, screaming “Nazi murderer!” at the top of his lungs. Anielewicz made it up to his knees just in time to see Silberman spring on Friedrich’s back. They went down in a thrashing heap. That was a fight in which Silberman was bound to get the worse of it, and quickly, but Friedrich hadn’t beaten and kicked him into unconsciousness before a couple of Mauser-carrying Jewish fighting men put an end to the scrap with peremptory orders.

  Silberman gasped out his story. One of the fighting men asked Friedrich a one-word question: “Nu?”

  Friedrich gave a one-word answer: “Ja.”

  Two rifles barked, almost in the same instant. The gunshots made men who didn’t know what was going on cry out; a couple of women screamed. Pinchas Silberman burst into tears. Joy? Rage? Sadness that yet another death didn’t bring back his slaughtered family? Anielewicz wondered if he knew himself. One of the Jewish fighters said to the other, “Come on, Aaron, let’s get rid of this garbage.” They dragged Friedrich away by the heels. His body left a trail of blood on Lutomierska Street.

  Mordechai slowly got to his feet He still bent at the midsection; Friedrich was strong as a mule, and had hit the way a mule kicked, too. He’d been a pretty good companion, but when you set what he’d done before against that—Anielewicz shook his head. The German had probably deserved to die, but if all the people who deserved to die on account of what they’d done in the war dropped dead at once, there’d be hardly more people left alive than after Noah’s flood. The world would belong to the Lizards.