Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Chill was used to such sniping, and gave as good as he got. “We were strong enough then to hold you out of Pskov,” he said with a chilly smile, “and we have got better since. My hope is that the Lizards will not do the same.”

  “I think they probably won’t,” Bagnall said in German; Aleksandr German translated for Vasiliev. “They seem to do the same old things over and over.”

  “Their old ones are quite bad enough,” Vasiliev said through Aleksandr German. “They are not imaginative fighters”—which was a hell of a thing for a Russian, the product of the world’s most rigid military system, to say—“but with their weapons and machines, they do not always need to be. We are lucky to have withstood them so long.”

  “For them, this is a subsidiary front,” General Chill said. “Had they put full effort into it, they might well have overrun us.”

  Nikolai Vasiliev puffed out his broad chest. With his dark, curly beard, he looked like a proud bandit chieftain—which in many ways he was. The flickering lamplight only added to the impression. But he was also a Soviet citizen and proud of it, for he said, “The marvelous bomb the Great Stalin touched off south of Moscow taught the Lizards better than to risk too much against us in any one place.”

  Bagnall glanced over at Lieutenant General Chill. The Wehrmacht officer looked as if he’d bitten into something sour. The Germans set great store on their scientific ingenuity. To have to listen to someone he probably thought of as a Slavic Untermensch going on about the achievements of Soviet science had to be galling—and all the more so because the Nazis hadn’t matched that bomb.

  Aleksandr German said, “We cannot count on the Lizards’ holding back forever. We need to force them to retreat wherever we can, to regain the soil of the rodina, the motherland. General Chill, will our men fight side by side in this, as they have the past year and more?” Except when they were shooting at one another, Bagnall glossed silently to himself.

  Despite that reservation, he looked for Chill to give hearty assent. Chill had better give his assent, if any planned winter offensive was to get anywhere. The Russians had more soldiers in Pskov than the Nazis did, but their men were armed with rifles and submachine guns and a few machine guns. The Germans were the ones who had the artillery, the lorries, the carefully husbanded panzers, the even more carefully husbanded petrol.

  “I shall have to examine the overall strategic situation,” was what Chill did say. “Standing on the defensive until spring may prove a wiser, more economical choice.”

  Vasiliev and Aleksandr German both shouted at him. Coward was one of the kinder words they used. Bagnall found himself speechless. Up till now, Chill had always been an aggressive commander, willing, even eager, to spend lives to gain territory. Of course, a lot of the lives he’d spent around Pskov were Russian . . .

  Not only were a lot of the lives Chill had spent Russian, so was a lot of the matériel. The German garrison at Pskov had done plenty of hard fighting, and the Lizards in Poland cut them off from the Vaterland (one of these days, he’d have to think about what the differences between rodina and Vaterland implied, but not now, not now).

  As innocently as he could, Bagnall asked, “How is your supply situation, General Chill?”

  “Given all we have done, it is not bad,” Chill answered. Bagnall had heard a great many more responsive replies. The German officer’s face said more; it reminded Bagnall of the look a poker player wore when he’d got himself into a big hand and had to own up to holding nothing more ferocious than a pair of nines.

  From strident, Aleksandr German’s voice went soft, persuasive: “Generalleutnant, supplies from the Soviet Union would probably be available. The routes and the amounts are not always what they might be, but they do exist. Surely your well-trained men would not have much trouble getting used to Soviet weapons.”

  “Hardly—we captured enough of them on the way here,” Chill said with as much aplomb as he could muster: more than Bagnall had guessed he had in him. He was indeed a formidable man. When he continued, he cut straight to the heart of the problem: “If I take Soviet supplies and grow to depend on them to keep my force in being, then before long I have to take Soviet orders, too.”

  “If you don’t, then before long you have no supplies and it no longer matters whose orders you take, because you won’t be able to carry them out in any case,” Aleksandr German said.

  Nikolai Vasiliev’s eyes lit up with a fierce light. “And when you have no supplies left, no point to our truce any more, either. We will restore Pskov to the rodina then, and we will remember what you have done here.”

  “You’re welcome to try, at any time you choose,” Chill answered calmly. “This I tell you, I do not lie: we have plenty to knock any number of partisans back into the woods, or into graves in them. By all means feel free to test what I say.” The German soldier glared fiercely back at Vasiliev. By the look in his eye, he would sooner have killed Russians than Lizards any day of the week.

  “Enough, both of you!” Bagnall exclaimed. “The only ones who gain when we bicker are the Lizards. We would do well to remember that. We can hate one another later, after the main war is won.”

  Kurt Chill and Aleksandr German both stared at him as if he’d suddenly started spouting Swahili. After Aleksandr German translated, Nikolai Vasiliev gave Bagnall that same dubious look. But slowly, one by one, the three leaders nodded. “This is truth,” Chill said. “We would do well to remember it.”

  “Da,” Aleksandr German said. But he could not resist twisting the knife: “Also truth, Herr Generalleutnant, is that sooner or later, hoard them or use them, your German munitions will be exhausted. Then you will use those of the Soviet Union or you will cease being soldiers.”

  Lieutenant General Chill looked as if he’d found a worm—worse, found half a worm—in his apple. The prospect of becoming not just allies but dependents on the Soviet Union, after being first overlords and then at least superior partners because of superior firepower, had to be anything but appetizing for him.

  “It can work,” Bagnall insisted, not just to the Wehrmacht officer but also to the partisan brigadiers. And yet it wasn’t their shaky truce that made him speak with such conviction; it was the passionate affair that German mechanic who’d come into Pskov with Ludmila Gorbunova was having with the fair Tatiana (much to Bagnall’s relief, and even more to Jerome Jones’). The pair still didn’t like each other much, but that didn’t stop them from coming together every chance they got. They should be a lesson for all of us, Bagnall thought.

  “This should be a lesson for all of us,” Atvar said, looking with one eye at the video of the damage to the gas-mask factory in Albi and with the other at Kirel. “Whatever we thought of our security procedures, they have been starkly revealed as inadequate.”

  “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “And yet, the destruction was not so bad as it would have been had these mortar rounds contained explosives rather than poison gas. Now that the plant has been decontaminated, it is ready to resume full operation.”

  “Ready physically, yes.” Atvar felt ready himself, ready to bite something. In lieu of an actual enemy, poor Kirel would have to do. “Of course, the decontamination cost us four irreplaceable males of the Race. Of course, the gas attack itself killed most of one entire shift of highly trained Big Uglies. Of course, the Big Uglies who work the other two shifts are afraid to go back into the plant even if it is decontaminated, for one thing because they don’t believe it truly is and for another because they fear the Deutsche will attack once more—and how can we blame them for that when we fear it ourselves? Other than these minor details, the plant is, as you said, ready to start up again.”

  Kirel crouched down, as if he expected to be bitten. “Exalted Fleetlord, it is merely a matter of bringing in other Tosevites who have this skill: either that or making it plain to the locals that if they do not do this work, they will not eat.”

  “Bringing Tosevites into one area from another is far more d
ifficult than it would be on a properly civilized world,” Atvar said, “for they are not simply Tosevites, essentially the same regardless of from which part of the planet they spring. Some are Français Tosevites, some are English Tosevites, some are Italiano Tosevites, some are Mexicano Tosevites, and so on. They all have their own foods, they all have their own languages, they all have their own customs, and they all think their ways are superior to everyone else’s, which touches off fights whenever groups from two regions come together. We’ve tried; the Emperor knows we’ve tried it.” He cast down his eyes not so much in reverence as in worn resignation. “It does not work.”

  “The other approach will, then,” Kirel said. “No matter what foods they eat, all the Big Uglies must eat some foods. If they fail to produce what we require of them, they will also fail to be fed.”

  “This has some merit, but, again, not so much as I would wish,” Atvar said. “The sabotage level in Tosevite factories producing goods for us is already unacceptably high. Wherever we try to coerce the workers to produce more or produce under harsher conditions, it goes higher. This is intolerable when the product under discussion is as important as a gas mask.”

  “Truth,” Kirel said again, this time wearily. “The Big Uglies’ poison gas has already lowered the morale of fighting males to the point where they have shown reluctance to go into combat in areas bordering the Deutsche. And now the Americans are also beginning to deploy it in large quantities. If males cannot have confidence in their protection, their fighting spirit will plummet further, with unfortunate consequences for our efforts here.”

  “Unfortunate consequences indeed,” Atvar said. What if his males simply upped and quit fighting? He’d never imagined such a thing. No commander in the history of the Race (and perhaps not in its prehistory, either) had ever had to imagine such a thing. The Race’s discipline had always proved reliable—but nothing had ever tested it as it was being tested now.

  “If the males waver, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, “perhaps we can bolster their spirits with the Tosevite herb known as ginger.”

  Atvar stared at him.

  Kirel crouched again, lower than he had before “It was intended as a joke, Exalted Fleetlord, nothing more.”

  “It is not funny,” Atvar said. It also wasn’t the worst idea he’d ever heard, not in the present circumstances. That frightened him more than anything.

  The Lizards’ air-raid alarms went off in Lodz. They weren’t sirens, as they would have been had human beings made them. Instead, they reminded Mordechai Anielewicz of nothing so much as the sound of a cauldron full of sizzling fat—except the cauldron had to be half the size of Poland. They were, he gathered, an enormously amplified version of the noise a Lizard made when something frightened it.

  All that ran through his mind in less time than he needed to snatch up a gas mask and stick it on his head. Then, along with the rest of the Jews in the offices above the fire station, he dashed for the sealed room. People got in one another’s way, cursing and stumbling and falling down.

  He made it to the sealed room just as a Nazi rocket came down with a crash. He tried to gauge how far away it had landed by the sound of the explosion, but that was tricky these days. The rockets that carried gas didn’t make a bang nearly so big as that from the ones carrying explosives—but they were much more to be feared, even so.

  “Shut the door!” four people bawled at once.

  With a slam, somebody obeyed. Packed into the middle of the sardinelike crush and turned the wrong way anyhow, Mordechai couldn’t see who. He looked up at the ceiling. Fresh plaster gleamed all around its periphery, covering over the cracks between it and the walls. Similar plaster marred the paint on those walls where they joined one another and also covered the molding that had marked their separation from the floor. Even if a gas-carrying rocket hit close by, the sealed room would—everyone inside hoped—let the people it sheltered survive till the deadly stuff dissipated.

  Splashes said people nearest the doorway were soaking cloths in a bucket of water and stuffing them into the cracks between the door and the wall. The German poison gas was insidious stuff. If you left a chink in your armor, the gas would find it

  The Lizards’ alarm kept hissing. Before long, the merely human air-raid siren added its wail to the cacophony. “Does that mean we’re not done, or just that people are too addled to turn those noisy things off?” one of the secretaries asked, her voice muffled by the mask she wore.

  “We’ll find out,” Anielewicz said, along with three other men and a woman. Lately, the Nazis had found a new way to keep the Lizards and humans in Lodz from getting anything done: lobbing rockets at the city every so often, making people take shelter and stay there for fear of gas. Not everyone had a sealed room to which to go, and not all sealed rooms were as cramped as this one, but the ploy was good enough to tie Lodz in knots.

  “I wish the Lizards would shoot down the rockets, the way they did when the Nazis first started firing them at us,” a woman said.

  “The Lizards are almost out of their own rockets,” Mordechai answered. “These days, they only use them when one of the Germans’ happens to head straight for an installation of theirs.” That wasn’t an everyday occurrence; while the Lizards could make rockets that went exactly where they wanted, those of the Nazis were wildly inaccurate. Anielewicz went on, “If a rocket lands in the middle of Lodz, that’s just too bad for the people under it.”

  “The Race is doing what it can for us,” David Nussboym declared. Several people nodded emphatically. Mordechai Anielewicz rolled his eyes. He suspected he wasn’t the only one, but with everybody in concealing gas masks, he couldn’t be sure. The Jewish administration and fighters in Lodz were in a delicate position. They had to cooperate with the Lizards, and some—Nussboym among them—still did so sincerely. Others, though, hurt the aliens every chance they got, so long as they could do it without getting discovered. Keeping track of who was in which camp made life more interesting than Anielewicz liked.

  Another blast, this one close enough to shake the fire station. Even without a large charge of explosive, several tons of metal falling out of the sky made for a big impact. Anielewicz shivered. Working against the Lizards often meant covertly working with the Nazis, even when their poison gas was killing Jews inside Lodz. Some Jews supported the Lizards simply because they could not stomach working with the Nazis no matter what.

  Anielewicz understood that. He sympathized with it, but not enough to feel the same way himself. The Nazis had been gassing Polish Jews before the Lizards arrived, and they’d kept right on doing it even after the Lizards took Poland away from them. They were without a doubt bastards; the only good thing Mordechai could think to say about them was that they were human bastards.

  Minutes crawled slowly past Mordechai kept hoping, praying for the all-clear signal. Instead, another rocket landed. The siren and the alarm hiss went on and on. He drew in breath after breath of stagnant air. His feet began to hurt. The only place to sit—or rather, squat—in the sealed room was over a latrine bucket in a tiny curtained corner. Just getting there wasn’t easy.

  At last the amplified hiss faded and the sirens changed to a warbling note before ceasing altogether. “Gevalt!” somebody said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Is it safe?” somebody else asked. “Just because the rockets aren’t coming, does that mean the gas has gone away?”

  “We can’t stay here forever,” Mordechai said. “I’ll go out and look around, see if anyone close by is down from the gas. If I don’t come back in five minutes . . . you’ll know I shouldn’t have gone.” With such gallows humor, he elbowed his way toward the door.

  When he got outside, he was relieved not to find people lying dead on Lutomierska Street in front of the fire station. He hadn’t expected he would find that; none of the explosions had sounded close enough to produce such a result. But the Germans’ gas was insidious stuff, and sometimes spread more in one direction than another
. The minute you stopped assuming it could kill you, it probably would.

  He looked around. One column of smoke was rising from the north, from the Polish part of Lodz, the area where Germans who’d called the place Litzmannstadt had settled before the Lizards came. Not many of them were left; the Poles and the Jews had had their revenge. Too bad, in a way. There would have been delicious irony in the Nazis’ gassing the Germans they’d sent out to dwell in a land that wasn’t theirs.

  More smoke, though, rose from closer to home. One of the rockets had hit in the Jewish district. That must have been the second one, Mordechai thought, the one that shook the station. He snarled. Even now, fighting the Lizards, the Nazis were killing Jews. He was sure they knew it, too. They probably thought it was a hell of a good joke—and that some of the Jews were cooperating with them against the Lizards an even better one.

  He went back inside before the people in the sealed room decided he’d become a casualty, too. He hurried upstairs. “It’s safe to come out,” he said. “We had a hit in the ghetto, though.” Now that the Germans were gone, it wasn’t formally a ghetto any more. It still functioned as one, though, and the name lingered.

  “The fire engine will have to go tend to it,” David Nussboym said. “I volunteer to ride along.” That took courage; the Germans’ gas could kill you not only if you breathed it but if it got on your skin. Anielewicz would have preferred to think of anyone who collaborated with the Lizards as a spineless coward. Nussboym complicated his picture of the world.

  He wanted to volunteer himself, to show Nussboym people who disagreed with him had spirit, too. But he made himself keep quiet. With the collaborator away from the offices, people who wanted to deal with the Lizards instead of sucking up to them could speak freely.

  “Come on,” said Solomon Gruver, the big, burly man who led the fire brigade and drove the engine. His men and Nussboym ran for the stairs.