Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  A stream of lorries rolled out of the gas-mask plant as the two Germans came up to it. The lorries headed off to the east, to help save Lizards from German gas. The factory itself was a large, nondescript building of orange brick, utterly unremarkable from the outside. Only the Lizard guards who paced its perimeter with automatic rifles made it seem at all important.

  Jäger didn’t even turn his head toward it. He just glanced at it out of the corner of his eyes as he mooched on past. As for Skorzeny, he might not even have suspected the place existed, let alone that it manufactured goods which hurt the Reich. He was pompous and arrogant, no doubt about that, but a mission made him all business.

  He and Jäger bought lunch at a little café a couple of blocks from the gas-mask factory. The chicken—actually, almost chickenless—stew was pretty bad, even by wartime standards, but the house wine that went with it was noticeably better than ordinaire. After a couple of glasses, you stopped noticing the stringy carrots and sad potatoes that accompanied the little diced-up bits of chicken-or rabbit, or maybe cat.

  Lunch finished, Jäger and Skorzeny walked back the way they had come. The Lizards took no notice of them. Skorzeny started whistling something. After the first few bars, Jäger gave him a shot in the ribs with an elbow. A good thing, too; it was the “Horst Wessel Song.”

  When they got back to the flat, Skorzeny hopped up and down like a kid with a new toy. “I want to do it now,” he said, over and over.

  “Better we wait till tonight,” Jäger kept answering. “Less chance of someone noticing us setting up a mortar in the middle of the Parc Rochegude.”

  “But they’re more likely to notice us carrying the stuff at night,” Skorzeny argued. “You carry boxes during the day, you’re a workman. You carry boxes at night, if you’re lucky people think you’re a burglar on your way to do a job. You aren’t so lucky, they think you’ve already done it and they try to rob you.”

  “No,” Jäger said yet again. “The park is just a little ways away—that’s why we took this flat, remember? We can carry all our gear in one trip, set up in the middle of that nice stand of elms we found, and start firing. We can get off eight or ten bombs in a minute or so and then get the hell out of there. What could be better than that?”

  “Watching the fur fly,” Skorzeny answered without hesitation. Then he sighed. “I don’t suppose we could do that anyway. Wouldn’t be a good idea to walk past the factory on our way out of town.”

  “Why?” Jäger said in mock astonishment. “Just because we’ll have lobbed eight or ten bombs full of Tabun into it and around the neighborhood? All we’d have to do is hold our breath as we went by.”

  “You’re right—maybe we could get away with it.” Before Jäger could explode, Skorzeny laughed at him. “I’m joking, son, I’m joking.”

  “Tabun isn’t anything to joke about.” Jäger cast a respectful eye on the mortar bombs he and Skorzeny had carried down through the Lizard lines from Germany. Had one of those bombs developed the tiniest leak, the sun would have gone dark in the sky, his lungs would have stopped working, and he wouldn’t have made it to Albi.

  “Well, I don’t say you’re wrong about that,” Skorzeny answered. “It’s some very nasty stuff, for a fact. The Führer wasn’t going to use it, even against the Lizards, till the British hauled out their mustard gas. Then I suppose he decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.”

  “The Führer knows about gas,” Jäger said. “He was in the trenches in France himself.” He remembered his own days there, the frantic cries of alarm when the gas shells started landing, the struggle to get your mask on and tight before the tendrils of poison reached you and started eating your lungs, the anguished cries of comrades who hadn’t grabbed their masks fast enough, the stifling feel of every breath, the way you started wanting to tear off the mask after you’d worn it for hours on end, no matter what happened to you once you did . . . Across a quarter of a century, those memories remained vivid enough to make the fear sweat prickle up under his arms.

  Grumpily, Otto Skorzeny said, “All right, Jäger, we’ll do it your way, tonight when it’s nice and dark. Should be clear, too, which won’t be bad if we can spy the North Star through the trees. Give us a better gauge of true north than our compasses would if somebody’s tampered with our marks.”

  “That’s true,” Jäger said. They’d picked the spot from which they would fire a good while before. Thanks to some excellent maps of Albi and their French friends (no, not friends, partners: the Frenchmen had been enemies of Vichy when Pétain collaborated with the Germans, and remained enemies now that he was collaborating with the Lizards), they knew the range and bearing from their chosen copse in the Parc Rochegude to the gas-mask factory, to within a few meters and minutes of the arc. It was just a matter of getting the mortar pointing in the right direction, fiddling with the elevation screw, and firing away.

  To kill time till darkness fell, they played skat. As he usually did, Skorzeny won money from Jäger. They were playing for Vichy francs, though, so the losses hardly felt real. Jäger thought of himself as a pretty fair cardplayer, and wondered if Skorzeny cheated. He’d never caught him at it and, if he did, Skorzeny would make jokes about it and turn it into a lark. What could you do?

  When twilight came and the sky turned purple-gray, Skorzeny stuck the cards in his pocket and said, “Shall I make us some supper?”

  “I thought you wanted us to live till tonight,” Jäger said, which earned him a glare from the bigger man. As anyone does who spends time in the field, Skorzeny had learned to cook after a fashion: roasted meats, stews made from whatever was handy thrown into a pot and stuck over the fire for a while. Since Jäger cooked the same way, he waved a hand to tell Skorzeny to go ahead.

  You couldn’t do a lot to mess up beans and cabbage and onions and carrots and potatoes. The stew was bland and boring, but it filled the belly. At the moment, Jäger didn’t care about anything else. The flat had good blackout curtains. That let him turn on the electric lights after supper, and let Skorzeny win more funny money from him with those possibly trained pasteboards.

  Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven . . . the hours crawled slowly past. When midnight struck, Skorzeny loaded the thirty kilos of mortar onto his back, slung into a big cloth bag. Jäger carried the bombs in the packs he and the SS man had used to bring them down from German-held territory.

  They closed the door behind them and went downstairs and then outside as quietly as they could. Every little clank they made seemed magnified in the dark, silent street. Jäger wondered how many people were peering at them as they trudged east down the Avenue du Maréchal Foch toward the park.

  He also wondered if he would make it to the park. Added together, the mortar bombs and powder charges were at least as heavy as the weapon that fired them, while he was not nearly so big and burly as Otto Skorzeny.

  He was staggering but still moving along when they got to the Parc Rochegude. A rustle in the bushes made him snatch for the pistol he wore in the waistband of his trousers. “Just a couple playing games,” Skorzeny said with a coarse laugh. “Might have been a couple of men, but it’s too dark for me to be sure.”

  The tree-surrounded open space they’d picked to set up the mortar had no couples using it, for which Jäger was heartily glad: he had found a discarded French letter in it one morning. “We won’t need the compass or the North Star,” he said with relief. A few days before, Skorzeny had splashed whitewash on a branch of one of the elms in the grove. Set the base plate of the mortar on the gray stone Jäger had placed in the grass, aim the barrel over the white splash, and the Lizards—and the humans who worked for them—would learn collaboration had its price.

  Skorzeny assembled the mortar, swearing softly when he barked his knuckles in the darkness. He’d practiced so often in the flat that the lethal little device quickly grew from a collection of innocent-looking hardware to an artillery piece. He lined it up roughly on the marked branch, then turned th
e traversing screw to bring it to exactly the bearing he wanted. At last he grunted in satisfaction and began adjusting the elevation screw so the mortar would fling its bombs just the right distance.

  Jäger, meanwhile, had been taking the bombs out of the packs and standing them on their tailfins by the mortar. Even without knowing the particularly lethal freight they carried, anyone would have recognized them as intended for no good purpose: nothing painted flat black and full of sharp curves and angles was apt to be a kiddie toy.

  “Flick on your lighter,” Skorzeny said. “I want to make sure I have the elevation right. Wouldn’t do to shoot over or under.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.” Jäger dug the lighter out of his pocket and flicked the wheel with his thumb. His breath came short and quick, as if he’d spied a Lizard panzer’s turret traversing to bring its main armament to bear on him. A cry of Qu’est-ce que c’est? and feet pounding toward the copse would be just as disastrous now.

  After what seemed like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than half a minute, Skorzeny said, “Everything’s fine. Douse it.” Jäger flicked the cover over the flame. Even that little noise made his heart pound. Well, the Parc Rochegude would know bigger noises any minute now.

  Skorzeny softly slapped him on the back. He took that as his signal to begin. Snatching up a bomb, he dropped it down the barrel of the mortar.

  Wham! The noise hit harder than that of a panzer’s cannon; he didn’t have several centimeters of steel shielding him from most of it now. He grabbed another bomb, sent it after the first one. Wham!

  Between shots, he tried to use his stunned ears to listen for any outcry, and for whistle blasts from the French gendarmerie. He didn’t hear anything, and prayed that meant there wasn’t anything to hear. He’d brought a dozen bombs in all. He’d hoped to be able to fire most of them before the uproar started. In just over a minute, he sent every one of them on its way.

  Skorzeny slapped him on the back again, this time hard enough to stagger him. “You can be on my mortar team any day!” the burly SS man bawled, his mouth as close to Jäger’s ear as if he’d been a lover.

  “That’s wonderful,” Jäger said dryly. “Now let’s get back to the flat before somebody spots us out here and puts two and two together.”

  “Just a minute.” Skorzeny grabbed the mortar by the tripod, heaved it up off the ground. Jäger started in alarm; the plan had called for leaving it behind. But Skorzeny didn’t carry it far. Close by the copse was a little pond. He heaved the mortar in with a splash. “They won’t find it till sunup this way, and maybe not for a while afterwards. By then, Gott mit uns, we’ll be on our way.”

  “Gott mit uns,” Jäger echoed. “Now come on, damn it.”

  They’d just shut the front door to their building when several men came round the corner and dashed toward the park. Jäger and Skorzeny hurried upstairs. The biggest worry in the plan had been that people would come out of their block of flats when the mortar started banging. That would make them notice the two men in Number 14 had been outside—and wonder why. They probably wouldn’t have wondered long.

  But the hallway was empty when Jäger closed the door behind him. He let out a long sigh of relief. Off in the distance, sirens wailed and bells clanged: ambulances and fire engines. Solemnly, he stuck out his hand. As solemnly, Skorzeny shook it.

  The SS man pulled the cork from a bottle of wine, took a swig, and passed it to Jäger. Jäger wiped it on his sleeve and then drank, too. “Success,” he said. Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down. After a moment, Jäger thought about what his toast had meant: some unknown number of Frenchmen—Frenchwomen, too, very likely—asphyxiating, not because they’d harmed him in particular but because, to support themselves and their families, they were turning out goods the Lizards could use.

  The wine turned to vinegar in his mouth. “This is a filthy business we’re in,” he said.

  “You just figured that out?” Skorzeny said. “Come on, Jäger, you’re not a virgin, except maybe in your left ear. If we don’t hurt the Lizards, we lose. If hurting the Lizards means hurting civilians, too, well, too bad. These things happen. We did what we were supposed to do, what our superiors ordered us to do.”

  “Ja,” Jäger said in a hollow voice. What Skorzeny didn’t get and wouldn’t get if he lived to be a hundred—not likely, considering how the SS man lived—was that what we were supposed to do and what our superiors ordered us to do weren’t necessarily one and the same thing.

  Soldiers didn’t commonly have to draw that distinction. Jäger hadn’t worried about it, not until he found out how the Germans dealt with Jews in the east. Since then, he hadn’t been able to look away. He knew what sort of disaster awaited the world if the Lizards won the war. Like Skorzeny, he was willing to do just about anything to keep that from happening. Unlike the SS man, he wasn’t willing to believe everything he did was fine and virtuous.

  That made for another subtle distinction, but he clung to it.

  Panting, Jens Larssen stopped at the top of Berthoud Pass. His breath smoked in the thin, cold air. Snow dappled the ground and turned the pines and firs into a picture right off a Christmas card. Snow and ice also turned US 40 into a slippery slalom course that had to be treated with the utmost respect.

  “Downhill from here,” Jens said. That was literally true; he’d lose more than a mile of altitude before he made it back to Denver, a bit more than fifty miles away. It also normally implied everything would be easy the rest of the way. Heading back to Denver wasn’t going to be easy. If your bike hit an icy patch and skidded while you were slogging uphill to the Continental Divide, you’d fall and scrape your shin. If you lost it while you were speeding down some of these steep grades, you’d break a leg—or your neck.

  “Slow and easy,” he said out loud, reminding himself. “Slow and easy.” He’d spent some of his time getting up to the pass walking the bicycle; he’d spend even more coming down. All the same, with luck he’d be in Denver in a couple of days, and then, before long, the Metallurgical Laboratory could pack up and head for Hanford and the Columbia.

  Up in Tabernash, a ways to the north, he’d bought a knitted wool sailor’s cap. God only knew what it was doing there; Tabernash was about as far from the sea as you could get in North America. He kept it pulled down over his ears, even though that made them itch. He also hadn’t bothered shaving since the leaves started turning colors. His beard had come in thick and strawberry blond; it did a surprisingly good job of keeping his cheeks and chin warm.

  “I wonder if Mary Cooley would know me,” he muttered; Idaho Springs lay only twenty miles or so to the east. His hand went over his shoulder and briefly caressed the barrel of the Springfield he wore slung on his back.

  But, now that he found himself close to Idaho Springs, he also found he wasn’t killing angry at the waitress who’d given him the clap, not any more. The sulfa tablets Dr. Henry had given him in Hanford had done the job. The disease wasn’t bothering him at all now. He didn’t even have the morning drop of pus he had to piss away with the day’s first whizz, so he supposed he was cured. I’ll let the bitch live, he thought, and felt magnanimous.

  The sky was the grayish-yellow color that warned of more snow coming. He made the best speed he could down US 40; the lower he was when it started to fall, the happier he’d be. One thing growing up in Minnesota did: it taught you what to do in a blizzard. And if he hadn’t learned then, traveling cross-country the winter before would have imparted a lesson or three.

  He rolled past an abandoned Studebaker. Dead cars and trucks lined the highway, here one, there a clump, here another. They’d make decent shelters if it really started coming down hard.

  Somewhere up off the road, a cougar yowled. The wildlife was probably having a high old time these days. Not a lot of people were able to get up here and go hunting, as they had once. Thinking of the Lizards being good for something on Earth felt odd.

  Jens’ hands tightened on the black rubber gri
ps of the handlebars. The Lizards hadn’t been good for him, not even slightly. If they’d just stayed on the pages of the pulp magazines where they belonged, he and Barbara would still be married and happy. He meant to say a thing or two to her when he got back to Denver—and to Sam Yeager, too. He’d been thinking about that, on and off, ever since he headed west.

  He reached back and patted the gun barrel again. That might end up doing some of his talking for him.

  He didn’t quite make it into Idaho Springs before darkness descended like a cloak. A few minutes later, the snow started falling. Larssen kept rolling along until he came to a dead car in the middle of the road. “A Cadillac, no less,” he said as he came up to it. It would be roomier than a lot of the autos in which he’d taken refuge during his travels.

  The Cadillac’s windows were rolled up and the doors locked, as if the fellow who’d been driving it had been sure he’d be back to get it pretty soon. Jens took savage pleasure in smashing the driver’s-side window with the butt of his rifle. He unlocked the door, opened it with a squeak of rusty hinges, and reached inside to unlock the back door. Then he shut the front door again. He wondered if he should have shot out the front-door lock instead, to keep cold air from blowing in, and thought about going on and finding another car.

  “Hell with it,” he said. The window still had some glass in it, and he would have rolled it down a couple of inches for the fresh air anyhow. Even if the Cadillac was full of the musty smell of mildew, he wouldn’t find any better place to spread out his sleeping bag. The backseat was plenty long and plenty wide. It would have made a wonderful backseat for making out, though he doubted whether people who owned Cadillacs needed to use backseats for such purposes.