Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Muttering under his breath, he picked up the telephone once more. When the operator answered, he brightened. “Is that you, Yetta?” he said. “How are you this afternoon, darling?”

  “Saul?” she asked, as she’d been trained to do. Yetta wasn’t her real name. Mordechai didn’t know what it was, or what she looked like. The less he knew, the less he could give away if he fell into the Lizards’ hands.

  “The same. Listen, sweetheart, I need to talk to Meyer the baker. You know the one—his shop is right next to the Balut.”

  “I’ll try to put you through,” Yetta said. “We’ve been having some trouble with the wires down there, so it may take a while. Please be patient.”

  “For you darling, anything,” Anielewicz said. The Balut was code for Breslau, the nearest major city in German hands; had he wanted Poznan, he’d have asked for an establishment on Przelotna Street. Telephone lines between Lodz and Breslau were supposed to be down. In fact, they were down, but here and there illicit ground lines ran between Lizard-held territory and that which the Germans still controlled. Getting through on those lines wasn’t easy, but people like Yetta were supposed to know the tricks.

  Mordechai hoped she knew the tricks. He didn’t want to call Breslau, not so you’d notice, but he didn’t see that he had any choice, either. The Nazis, curse them, needed to know something large and ugly was heading their way. One reason the Lizards were relatively mild in Poland was that they had the Germans right next door, and needed to keep the locals contented. If Hitler and his crew folded up, the Lizards would lose their incentive to behave better.

  Gevalt, what a calculation to have to make, Anielewicz thought.

  Sooner than he’d expected, the phone on the other end of the line started ringing. Somebody picked it up. “Bitte?” came the greeting in crisp German. The connection was poor, but good enough.

  “Is this the shop of Meyer the baker?” Mordechai asked in Yiddish, and hoped the Nazi on the other end was on the ball.

  He was. Without missing a beat, he answered, “Ja. Was wilist du?—What do you want?”

  Anielewicz knew that was the du of insult, not intimacy, but held on to his temper. “I want to give an order I’ll pick up a little while from now. I want you to bake me fifteen currant buns, twenty-one onion bagels, and enough bread to go with them. No, I don’t know how much yet, not exactly; I’ll try to call you back on that. Do you have it? Yes, fifteen currant buns. How much will that come to? . . . Meyer, you’re a gonif and you know it.” He hung up in a good display of high dudgeon.

  A voice came from the doorway: “Laying in supplies?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes, Nussboym,” Mordechai answered, hoping he sounded calmer than he felt. “I was going to bring it all in so we could celebrate Bertha’s niece. Children deserve celebrating, don’t you think?” Now he’d have to go over to Meyer’s and buy all that stuff.

  David Nussboym walked into Mordechai’s room. He was several years older than Anielewicz, and a lot of the time acted as if he thought Mordechai had no business doing anything more than wiping his snotty nose. Now, scowling, he spoke in the manner of a professor to an inept student: “I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re lying to me, and that you were passing on code of some kind. There’s only one kind of code you’re likely to be passing, and only one set of people you’re likely to be passing it to. I think you’ve turned into Hitler’s tukhus-lekher.”

  Slowly, deliberately, Anielewicz got to his feet He was three or four centimeters taller than Nussboym, and used that height advantage to look down his nose at the older man. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said, his voice silky with menace. “You gabble on about tukhus-lekhers—I think you can lick my arse.”

  Nussboym stared. Nobody had talked to him like that since the Lizards ran the Germans out of Lodz. He’d had a year and a half to get used to being somebody. But he also had considerable native spirit, and the awareness that those in authority backed him. After drawing back a pace in surprise, he thrust his chin forward and snapped, “I wouldn’t talk so fine if I were you. I’ve been doing some quiet checking, Mr. Mordechai Anielewicz—oh, yes, I know who you are. Some males of the Race back in Warsaw would be very interested in having a word or two with you. I haven’t said anything to my friends there because I know these things can be misunderstandings, and you’ve done good work since you got here. But if you’re going to bring the Nazis back into Poland—”

  “God forbid!” Mordechai broke in, with complete sincerity. “But I don’t want the Lizards in Germany, either, and you can’t understand that side of the coin.”

  “I want Hitler dead. I want Himmler dead. I want Hans Frank dead. I want every Nazi bastard with SS on his collar tabs dead,” Nussboym said, his face working. “That wouldn’t begin to be payment enough for what they did to us. I’d sooner kill them all myself, but if I have to let the Race do it for me, I’ll settle for that.”

  “And then what happens?” Anielewicz demanded.

  “I don’t care what happens then,” David Nussboym answered. “That’s plenty, all by itself.”

  “But it’s not, don’t you see?” Mordechai said, something like desperation in his voice. “After that, who stops the Lizards from doing exactly as they please? If you know who I am, you know I’ve worked with them, too. They don’t make any bones about it: they intend to rule mankind forever. When they say forever, they don’t mean a thousand years like that madman Hitler. They mean forever, and they aren’t madmen. If they win now, we won’t get a second chance.”

  “Better them than the Germans,” Nussboym said stubbornly.

  “But you see, David, the choice isn’t that simple. We have to—” Without changing expression, without breaking off his flow of words, Amelewicz hit Nussboym in the belly, as hard as he could. He’d intended to hit him in the pit of the stomach and win the fight at the first blow, blitzkrieg-fashion, but his fist landed a few centimeters to one side of where he wanted to put it Nussboym grunted in pain but instead of folding up like a concertina, he grappled with Mordechai. They fell together, knocking over with a crash the chair on which Anielewicz had been sitting.

  Mordechai had done a lot of fighting with a rifle in his hand. It was a different business altogether when the fellow you were trying to beat wasn’t a tiny spot seen through your sights, but was at the same time doing his best to choke the life out of you. Nussboym was stronger and tougher than he’d figured, too. Again, he realized being on the opposite side didn’t turn you into a sniveling coward.

  Nussboym tried to knee him in the groin. He twisted aside and took the knee on the hip. He would have thought it even less sporting had he not tried to do the same thing to Nussboym a moment earlier.

  They rolled up against Mordechai’s desk. It was a cheap, light, flimsy thing, made of pine and plywood. Mordechai tried to bang Nussboym’s head against the side of it. Nussboym threw up an arm just in time.

  A heavy glass ashtray fell off the desk. Anielewicz was damned if he knew why he’d kept the thing around. He didn’t smoke. Even if he had smoked, nobody in Poland had any tobacco these days, anyhow. But the ashtray had been on his desk when he got the office, and he hadn’t bothered getting rid of it.

  It came in handy now. He and David Nussboym both grabbed for it at the same time, but Nussboym couldn’t reach it Mordechai’s arm was longer. He seized it and hit Nussboym in the head. Nussboym groaned but kept fighting, so Mordechai hit him again. After the third blow, Nussboym’s eyes rolled up and he went limp.

  Anielewicz struggled to his feet. His clothes were torn, he had a bloody nose, and he felt as if he’d just crawled out of a cement mixer. People crowded in the doorway, staring. “He was going to tell the Lizards who I am,” Mordechai said. His voice came out raw and rasping; Nussboym had come closer to strangling him than he’d thought.

  Bertha Fleishman nodded briskly. “I was afraid that would happen. Do you think we have to shut him up for good?”

  “I don’t
want to,” Mordechai answered. “I don’t want any more Jews dead. He’s not a bad man, he’s just wrong here. Can we get him out of the way for good?”

  She nodded again. “He’ll have to go east, but we’ll manage. I have enough Communist friends to be sure he’ll get into Russia without ever having the chance to speak his piece to the Lizards.”

  “What’ll happen to him there?” Anielewicz asked. “They’re liable to ship him to Siberia.” He’d meant it for a joke, but Bertha’s sober nod said it was indeed a possibility. Mordechai shrugged. “If that’s how it is, then that’s how it is. He’ll have a chance to stay alive there, and we’d have to kill him here.”

  “Let’s get him out of here for now,” Bertha said. More quietly, she added, “You ought to think about disappearing, too, Mordechai. Not everyone who favors the Lizards is as open as Nussboym. You could be betrayed any time.”

  He bit his lip. She was right He knew she was right. But the idea of going on the road again, finding another alias and joining a partisan band, pierced him with a chill worse than any winter’s gale.

  “Good-bye, Lodz. Good-bye, flat,” he muttered as he took hold of David Nussboym’s feet.

  18

  Heinrich Jäger felt like a table-tennis ball. Whenever he returned from a mission, he never knew where he would bounce up next: to Schloss Hohentübingen to help the men with the thick glasses and the high foreheads drive the explosive-metal bomb project forward, off on another run with Otto Skorzeny to tweak the Lizards’ snouts, or to lead panzers into battle, something he actually knew how to do.

  After he got back from Albi, they’d stuck him in a panzer again. That was where the powers that be stuck him when the war was going badly. If the Lizards overran the Vaterland, everything else became irrelevant.

  He stood up in the cupola of his Panther. The wind tore at him, even through his reversible parka. He wore it white side out now, to go with the panzer’s whitewashed turret and hull. The machine, large and white and deadly, reminded him of a polar bear as it rumbed east from Breslau. As for the parka, it kept him from freezing. Next to the makeshifts the Wehrmacht had used two winters before in Russia, it was a miracle. With it on, he was just cold. That seemed pretty good; he knew all about freezing.

  His gunner, a moon-faced corporal named Gunther Grillparzer, said, “Any sign of the Lizards yet, sir?”

  “No,” Jäger answered, ducking back down inside the turret to talk. “I tell you the truth: I’m just as glad not seeing them.”

  “Ach, ja;” Grillparzer said. “I just hope that call from the damned Jews wasn’t a pack of damned moonshine. For all we know, the bastards want to make us motor around and burn up petrol for no reason.”

  “They wouldn’t do that.” I hope they wouldn’t do that, Jäger added to himself. After what the Reich had done to the Jews in Poland, how could he blame them if they wanted revenge? Aloud, he went on, “The commandant seems convinced the call was legitimate.”

  “Ja, Herr Oberst,” Grillparzer said, “but those aren’t angels that come out the commandant’s arse when he squats on the WC, are they?”

  Jäger stood up again without answering. Russians and Lizards—and SS Einsatzgruppe men—followed orders without thinking about them. The Wehrmacht trained its soldiers to show initiative in everything they did—and if that made them less respectful of their superiors than they would have been otherwise, well, you had to take the bad with the good.

  They reached the crest of a low rise. “Halt,” Jäger told the driver, and then relayed the command to the rest of the panzers in the battle group: an ad hoc formation that essentially meant, all the armored vehicles we can scrape together for the moment. “We’ll deploy along this line. Hull down, everyone.”

  When a polar bear prowled through ice and snow, it was the most deadly predator in its domain. Foxes and badgers and wolverines stepped aside; seals and reindeer fled for their lives. Jäger wished—oh, how he wished!—the same held true for his Panther, and for the Panthers and Panzer IVs and Tigers with it.

  Unfortunately, however, in straight-up combat it took anywhere from five to a couple of dozen German panzers to knock out one Lizard machine. That was why he had no intention of meeting the Lizards in straight-up combat if he could possibly help it. Strike from ambush, fall back, hit the Lizards again when they stormed forward to overwhelm the position you’d just evacuated, fall back again—that was how you hurt them.

  He wished for a cigarette, or a cigar, or a pipe, or a dip of snuff. He’d never tasted snuff in his life. He just wanted tobacco. There were stories that people had killed themselves when they couldn’t get anything to smoke. He didn’t know if he believed those or not, but he felt the lack.

  He had a little flask of schnapps. He took a nip now. It snarled its way down his gullet. It might have been aged half an hour before somebody poured it into a bottle. Then again, it might not have. After he drank, he felt warmer. The doctors said that was nonsense. To hell with the doctors, he thought.

  What was that off in the distance? He squinted through swirling snow. No, it wasn’t a horse-drawn wagon: too big and too quick. And there came another behind it, and another. His stomach knotted around the schnapps. Lizard panzers, heading this way. Down into the turret again. He spoke two brief sentences, one to the gunner—“The Jews weren’t lying”—and one to the loader—“Armor-piercing.” He added one more sentence over the wireless for the benefit of the battle group: “Hold fire to within five hundred meters.”

  He stuck head and shoulders out into the cold again, raising binoculars to his eyes for a better look. Not just Lizard panzers coming this way, but their personnel carriers, too. That was good news and bad news. The panzers could smash them, but if they disgorged their infantry before they were hit, they were very bad news. Lizard foot soldiers carried antipanzer rockets that made Panzerschrecks look like cheap toys by comparison.

  The panzer troops he commanded had plenty of fire discipline, danken Gott dafür. They’d wait as he had ordered, let the Lizards get close and then hit them hard before dropping back to the next ridge line. They’d—

  Maybe the crew of the Tiger a few hundred meters away hadn’t been paying attention to the wireless. Maybe their set was broken. Or maybe they just didn’t give a damn about fire discipline. The long-barreled 88 roared with the leaders of the Lizard force still a kilometer and a half away.

  “Dumbheaded pigdog!” Jäger screamed. The Tiger scored a clean hit. One of the personnel carriers stopped dead, smoke spurting from it. Through the dying reverberations of the cannon shot, Jäger heard the crew of the Tiger yelling like drunken idiots. The resemblance didn’t end there, either, he thought bitterly.

  He ducked into the turret once more. Before he could speak, Gunther Grillparzer said it for him: “The Lizards know we’re here.”

  “Ja.” Jäger slapped the gunner on the shoulder. “Good luck. We’ll need it” He spoke to the driver over the intercom. “Listen for my orders, Johannes. We may have to get out of here in a hurry.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Oberst!”

  They were agood crew, probably not quite so fine as the one he’d had in France—Klaus Meinecke had been a genius with a cannon—but damn good. He wondered how much that was going to help them. Exactly what he’d feared was happening. Instead of motoring blithely down the highway toward Breslau and presenting their flanks for close-range killing shots, the Lizard panzers were turning to face his position straight on. Neither a Tiger’s main armament nor a Panther’s could penetrate their glacis plates and turrets at point-blank range, let alone at fifteen hundred meters.

  And the personnel carriers were pulling back even farther. He got on the all-panzers circuit: “They know we’re here now. Panzer IVs, concentrate on the carriers. Gott mit uns, we’ll come out of this all right.” Or some of us will, anyhow, he glossed mentally. Some of them wouldn’t.

  The Panzer IVs along the line of the ridge opened up, not only with armor-piercing shells to wreck the perso
nnel carriers but also with high-explosive rounds to deal with the Lizards who’d left before being hit. The order was cold-blooded calculation on Jäger’s part. The IVs had the weakest cannons and the weakest armor of the machines in the battle group. Not only were they best suited for handling the carriers, they were also the panzers Jäger could best afford to lose when the Lizards started shooting back.

  He’d hoped the Lizard panzers would come charging up the slope toward his position, cannon blazing. The Russians had made that mistake time and again, and the Lizards more than once. That kind of rush would give his Panther and Tiger crews close-range shots and shots at the Lizards’ side armor, which their cannon could penetrate.

  The Lizards were learning, though. Their panzer crews had been through combat, too, and had a notion of what worked. They didn’t need to charge; they could engage at long range. Even at fifteen hundred meters, a hit from one of their monster shells would blow—did blow—the turret right off a Panzer IV and send it blazing into the snow. Jäger clenched his fists. With luck, the commander, gunner, and loader there never knew what hit them.

  Nor were the armored personnel carriers helpless against panzers. Their light cannon wouldn’t penetrate turret armor, but some of them carried rockets on launch rails on the sides of their turrets. Like the ones the Lizard infantry used, those had no trouble cracking a panzer.

  “Retreat!” Jäger bawled on the all-hands frequency. “Make them come to us.” The Maybach in the Panther he personally commanded bellowed louder as it stopped idling and went into reverse.

  “This’ll be interesting,” Grillparzer shouted up at Jäger. “Will we be in our new position before they get up here where we are now and start blasting away at us?”

  Interesting wasn’t the word Jäger would have used, but it would do. The trouble was, the Lizard panzers were not only better armed and armored than the ones the Wehrmacht had, they were faster, too. General Guderian hadn’t been joking when he said a panzer’s engine was as important a weapon as its gun.