Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  But he had not come here to mock the capitalists, he had come to deal with them. He’d dealt with the Nazis; he could stand this. He looked around at the bustling activity on the docks. Even invaded, America remained formidably productive and economically strong. He even saw some petrol-powered lorries hauling goods away once they’d been taken off their ships. Back in the USSR, every drop of petrol and diesel fuel went directly to the war effort, to tanks and airplanes. Donkeys and horses and strong backs hauled goods from one place to another.

  Waiting on the pier was, not a taxicab as he’d half expected, but a horse-drawn buggy of American design. Molotov was not insulted at failing to rate a motorcar of his own. The Lizards had a habit of strafing automobiles, on the assumption that whoever was in them was liable to be important. As a result, people who were genuinely important traveled for the most part in horse-drawn conveyances, like everyone else.

  When Molotov and his interpreter climbed aboard the carriage, the driver surprised him by greeting him in good Russian: “Dobry den, Gospodin Molotov.”

  “Good day to you as well, but I am Tovarishch Molotov, if you please,” the foreign commissar answered. Gospodin was what you would have called an aristocrat before the Revolution. The simple comrade showed proper egalitarianism.

  “However you like,” the driver said, equably enough. Molotov did not think him a native Russian-speaker; he had a trace of the sibilant accent English gave to Russian. Perhaps his parents had come to the United States and he’d learned his ancestral language from them—or he could have been an American who’d studied Russian thoroughly, as Molotov’s interpreter had studied English.

  The interpreter leaned forward in his seat as the carriage began rolling. He looked petulant. Molotov understood that: if the interpreter was not useful, he would soon be performing a function where he was, most likely a function that involved carrying a rifle, living on whatever he could scrounge, and trying to survive against superior Lizard firepower.

  “You are going to the Subtreasury Building, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the driver said. “Our first president, George Washington, took his oath of office in front of the old city hall that used to stand there. Inside, in a glass case, is the very stone he stood on.”

  “How interesting,” Molotov lied.

  “Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the interpreter said hoarsely, pointing to a sign on a corner, “we are traveling down Wall Street at this very moment.” He looked around in alarm, as if he expected an assault from a regiment of swag-bellied plutocrats in toppers, cutaways, and spats, each one sporting a diamond ring bigger than the last and puffing a fat cigar.

  Molotov looked around, too. Some of the people on the fabled street did wear business suits, but more were in workmen’s clothes or uniforms. They didn’t look quite so shabby as men on the street in war-ravaged Moscow, but they didn’t seem wildly wealthy, or even prosperous, either.

  In a helpful tone of voice, the driver said, “The Subtreasury Building is right across the street from the New York Stock Exchange.” Had Molotov’s interpreter had an apotropaic amulet, he would have taken it out and brandished it at the mention of that tool of the Soviets’ ideological devil.

  The Subtreasury Building was a dignified structure in the Greek Revival style of the previous century. To Molotov, for whom socialist realism was as much an article of faith as the doctrine of the Incarnation was to Pope Pius XII, having a building pretend to be something it wasn’t summed up the dishonesty of the capitalist system. That the skyscrapers along Wall Street dwarfed the Subtreasury Building told him everything he needed to know about where economic power in the United States really lay.

  A bronze statue of a man in outmoded clothing stood on the steps. As Molotov went past it, his interpreter said, “There is George Washington, the first president of the United States.”

  Molotov dismissed the first president in half a dozen words: “He is dressed like an aristocrat.” The offhand condemnation made the man who had driven him to the Subtreasury Building mutter something under his breath. Behind the impassive mask Molotov always wore, he chuckled to himself.

  Inside, a smiling flunky led him and the interpreter to a large, airy, well-lit chamber. The men waiting behind the tables there rose politely as he came in. “Good morning, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” Cordell Hull said. “Excellent to see you again.”

  “I am pleased to have this opportunity to consult with my allies in the joint struggle against the imperialist aggressors from the stars,” Molotov answered, keeping any dealing on a personal level to a minimum. “It is also good to have representatives of Great Britain here, after the heroic resistance her people have shown against the aliens’ invading forces.”

  “Do you know Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Halifax?” the American Secretary of State asked.

  “I had the honor of meeting Lord Beaverbrook in Moscow two years ago, when he headed the Anglo-American mission on sending aid to the Soviet Union after the unprovoked and perfidious fascist attack,” Molotov said, nodding to the present British Minister of Supply.

  “Good to see you again, Molotov,” Lord Beaverbrook said, sticking out his hand. He was a tall, ruddy, balding man in his mid-sixties, with a shrewd, blunt-featured face and an air of energy that would have done credit to someone half his age.

  “You will introduce me to Lord Halifax?” Molotov said. “We have never met in the flesh.”

  What he did know about Halifax, he did not fancy. The British ambassador to the United States had been Foreign Secretary under Neville Chamberlain before war broke out and during most of its first year, till the Chamberlain government fell in the aftermath of disasters in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France. All through his time in office, he’d advocated appeasing the Hitlerite beast by tossing one country after another into its ravening maw.

  Now, though, he nodded civilly to Molotov and extended his right hand. The left sleeve of his coat hung limp; his left arm had been withered from birth, and lacked a hand. “A pleasure to meet you at last,” he murmured.

  “Indeed,” Molotov said, looking up at him. He was taller and balder than Beaverbrook—he had to be within a few centimeters of two meters tall. Most men, though, were taller than Molotov; he refused to let that, or anything else, intimidate him. “Now that we have dealt with the formalities, shall we move on to the business at hand?”

  “Yes, yes, by all means.” With his own hands, Cordell Hull pulled out a chair for Molotov, and then another for his interpreter. Molotov felt faintly scandalized; that was not proper work for a man whose rank matched his own. The American passion for showing equality of upper and lower classes even—sometimes especially—where that equality did not in truth exist always struck him as hypocritical.

  But diplomacy without hypocrisy was almost a contradiction in terms. Molotov said, “Let us review the present state of our alliance and plan our future moves against the common foe.”

  “Not all such planning is practicable,” Lord Beaverbrook put in. “The damned Lizards have plans of their own, as we found out to our sorrow this past summer.”

  “We were invaded first by the Nazis, then by the Lizards,” Molotov said. “We know in great detail what you have experienced.”

  “Russia being a large state—” Lord Halifax began.

  Molotov corrected him with icy precision: “The Soviet Union being a large state—”

  “Yes. Quite. Er, the Soviet Union being a large state,” Lord Halifax resumed, “you enjoyed the luxury of trading space for time, which allowed you more strategic options than were available to us.”

  “Thus your immediate use of poison gas,” Molotov said. “Yes. That, like our bomb from explosive metal, does seem to have been something which found the Lizards ill-prepared.”

  He watched Halifax and Beaverbrook preen, as if they’d been personally responsible for throwing mustard gas at the Lizards. Maybe Beaverbrook actually had had something to do with the decision; he’d been active in weapons developme
nt. Molotov reckoned poison gas an altogether mixed blessing. Not long after the English started using it, the Germans also did—a more lethal species, too. And the Germans had rockets to throw their gas farther than they could directly reach. Not for the first time, Molotov was glad the Lizards had landed in Poland. He would have liked their landing in Germany even better.

  The Nazis’ poison gas also seemed to be on Beaverbrook’s mind, for he said, “Technical cooperation among the allies is still not all it might be. We have yet to receive from Berlin—”

  “You won’t get anything from Berlin, any more than you would from Washington,” Cordell Hull said. “Or Tokyo, either, come to that.”

  “From the Germans, I should say,” Lord Beaverbrook replied. “Ahem. We’ve not received from the Germans the specifics of their new suffocating gas, nor indeed any word from them on their progress toward nuclear weapons for some time.”

  “We and they were enemies before; our present alliance with them is nothing more than a convenience,” Molotov said. “We should not be surprised when it creaks.” The Anglo-American-Soviet alliance against the Hitlerites had also been one of convenience, as had the Nazi-Soviet pact before that. You didn’t stay wedded to an alliance because it was there; you stayed because it was useful for you. What had Austria said, refusing to help Russia during the Crimean War after the Romanovs rescued the Hapsburg throne? “We shall astonish the world by our ingratitude”—something like that. If you were in the game, you knew it had slippery rules. The British had some clues along those lines. Molotov wondered about the Americans, though.

  Because he still worried about the Germans almost as much as he did about the Lizards, Molotov said, “We have reports that the Nazis will be ready to begin using those bombs next spring.” He didn’t say he’d heard that himself, straight from Ribbentrop’s mouth. The United States and Britain endangered the future of the Soviet Union hardly less than the Nazis.

  “We can match that,” Cordell Hull said placidly. “We may even beat it.”

  That was more than Molotov had heard from Ribbentrop. He wondered if it was more than Ribbentrop knew. For that matter, he was always amazed when Ribbentrop knew anything. “If that is so, the war against the Lizards will take on an entirely different tone,” he observed.

  “So it will,” Hull said. “You Russians should have more of these weapons coming up soon, too, shouldn’t you?”

  “So we should.” Molotov let it go at that. Unfortunately, just because the Soviet Union should have had more explosive-metal bombs coming into production didn’t mean it would have them. He wondered how long the physicists would have before Stalin started liquidating them out of frustration. The Great Stalin’s virtues were multifarious—he would tell you as much himself. Patience, however, was not among them.

  Lord Halifax said, “If we show the Lizards we are their match in destructive power, my hope is that we shall then be able to negotiate a just and equitable peace with them.”

  Once an appeaser, always an appeaser, Molotov thought. “My hope is that we shall drive them off our world altogether,” he said. “Then the historical dialectic can resume from the point where it was interrupted.” And its processes can finish throwing Britain onto the rubbish heap.

  “That would not be easy under the best of circumstances,” Lord Beaverbrook said. “And circumstances are not of the best. The Lizards, as you will probably recall, have a colonization fleet traveling toward Earth, much as the Mayflower brought Englishmen and -women to what we then called the New World. Will their military forces flee, leaving the colonists nowhere to land? I think not.”

  Molotov hadn’t considered it from that perspective. He was certain Stalin hadn’t, either. And yet it made sense, even in dialectical terms. The Lizards were imperialists. So much was obvious. But what did the imperialists do? They didn’t just conquer locals. They also established colonies—and would fight to protect what they saw as their right to do so.

  Slowly, he said, “I do not wish to accept the permanent presence of these aliens on our world.”

  “I daresay the Red Indians weren’t overjoyed at the prospect of Pilgrim neighbors either,” Beaverbrook answered. “We must first make certain we aren’t simply overwhelmed, as they were.”

  “That’s an important point,” Cordell Hull said. “And one of the reasons the Indians got overwhelmed is that they never—or not often enough, anyway—put up a common fight against the white men. If a tribe had another tribe next door for an enemy, they wouldn’t think twice about joining with the new settlers to clear ’em out. And then, a few years later, it would be their turn, and they probably wondered what the devil happened to them. We can’t afford that, and we have to remember it. No matter how bad we think our neighbors are, living under the Lizards would be a damn sight worse.”

  Molotov thought not of Red Indians but of the tsars expanding Russian might at the expense of the nomads of the steppe and the principalities in the Caucasus. The principle, though, remained the same. And Hull was right: all the world’s leaders, even the Great Stalin, needed to remember it.

  “I shall convey your thoughts, and my agreement with them, to the General Secretary,” Molotov said.

  Cordell Hull beamed. “Thank you, Comrade Foreign Commissar. I hope you won’t mind my saying that this is, I believe, the first time you’ve expressed a personal opinion in all our talks.”

  Molotov considered. Slowly, he nodded. “You are correct, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “I apologize for the error. It was inadvertent, I assure you.”

  Heinrich Jäger accepted three francs in change from a shopkeeper after he bought a couple of meters of twine. Two were solid prewar coins. The third, instead of Marianne on the obverse, had a double-headed axe, two stalks of wheat, and the legend ETAT FRANÇAIS. It was made of aluminum, and felt weightless in his hand.

  The shopkeeper must have noticed the sour stare he sent the franc. “Vichy says we have to use them,” the fellow said with a shrug. “So do the Lizards.”

  Jäger just shrugged and stuck the coin in his pocket. The less he had to put his halting French on display in Albi, the happier he was. He and Otto Skorzeny had already been here longer than they wanted. Other raids Skorzeny planned had run like clockwork. Here, the clock was slow.

  He rolled up his twine and walked out of the shop onto the Avenue du Maréchal Foch. As always when he looked about in Albi, a line from some English poet sprang to mind. “A rose-red city half as old as time.” Pink and red brickwork predominated hereabouts, though brown and muddy yellow added to the blend. If one—or, here, two—had to rusticate, there were worse places than Albi in which to do it.

  The aluminum coin from Marshal Pétain’s mint went when he bought a kilo of haricots verts. He carried the beans back to the flat he and Skorzeny were sharing.

  He hoped his comrade in arms hadn’t brought home another tart. When Skorzeny had a mission directly before him, he was all business. When he didn’t, his attention wandered and he needed something else to keep him interested in the world. He’d also been drinking an ungodly lot lately.

  But when Jäger got back to the flat, he found Skorzeny alone, sober, and beaming from ear to ear. “Guess what?” the big SS man boomed. “Good old Uncle Henri finally shipped us the last piece we need to put our toy together.”

  “Did he? That’s first-rate,” Jäger said. A mortar was not an impressive-looking piece of lethal hardware, especially disassembled: a sheet-metal tube, an iron base plate, three legs for the tripod, and some straps and screws and a sight. Any individual component could go through the still-functional mails of Vichy France without raising a Gallic eyebrow. But now that the base plate had finally come, they could turn everything back into a mortar in a matter of minutes.

  “Let’s go do it now,” Skorzeny said excitedly.

  “In daylight?” Jäger shook his head. That idea still appalled him. “The plant runs three shifts. We’ll do just as much damage if we hit it at night, and we’ll have a bette
r chance of getting away clean.”

  “Sometimes, Jäger, you’re a bore,” Skorzeny said.

  “Sometimes, Skorzeny, you’re a crazy man,” Jäger retorted. He’d long since learned that you couldn’t let Skorzeny grab any advantage, no matter how tiny. If you did, he’d ride roughshod over you. The only thing he took seriously was a will whose strength matched that of his own, and God hadn’t turned out a whole lot of those.

  Now Skorzeny laughed, a raucous note that filled the little furnished flat “A crazy man? Maybe I am, but I have fun and the Lizards don’t.”

  “They’ll have even less fun once we’re through with them,” Jäger said. “Shall we walk by the factory one last time, make sure we’re not overlooking anything?”

  “Now you’re talking!” The prospect of action, of facing danger, always got Skorzeny’s juices flowing. “Let’s go.”

  “First smear that glop over your scar,” Jäger said, as he did whenever Skorzeny was about to go out in public in Albi. The Lizards were terrible at telling people apart, but that scar and the SS man’s size made him stand out. They made him stand out for human collaborators, too.

  “Bore,” Skorzeny repeated, but he rubbed the brown makeup paste over his cheek. It left him looking as if his face had been burned, but the Lizards weren’t looking for a man with a burn. They were after a man with a scar—and they won’t be shy about snapping up any friends he has along, either, Jäger thought.

  Baggy trousers, a tweed jacket, a cloth cap . . . to Jäger, they made Skorzeny look like a German in down-at-the-heels French clothes rather than a down-at-the-heels Frenchman, but he did know the Lizards were a less demanding audience. He thought the beret he wore made him look dashing. Skorzeny insisted it looked like a cowflop on his head. He took the chaffing in good part; wearing a beret in France these days meant you supported Vichy, which was exactly the impression he was trying to create.

  The factory was on the Rue de la Croix-Verte, in the northeastern part of the city. Jäger and Skorzeny walked past the theater and the Jardin National on their way to it. They ambled along, hands in their pockets, as if they had all the time in the world. Skorzeny gave a pretty girl the eye. She stuck her nose in the air, ignoring him with Gallic panache. He laughed as raucously as he had back in the apartment.