Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  The naval officer blinked at the question, then answered, “Damned if I know. Best guess I can give you is that S-class boats are built in such a tearing hurry, no one cares about anything past getting them out there to sink ships. Give us another couple of generations of engineering and the submarines will be much more comfortable to live in. Compared to what we had in the last war, I’m told, this is paradise.”

  To Russie’s way of thinking, paradise was not to be found in a narrow, smelly, noisy metal tube lit by dim orange lights so that it resembled nothing so much as a view of the Christian hell. If this was an improvement, he pitied the men who had put to sea in submarines about the time he was born.

  He, Rivka, and Reuven shared what normally would have been the executive officer’s cabin. Even by the dreadful standards of the Warsaw ghetto, it would have been cramped for one and was hideously crowded for three. When set against the sailors’ triple-decker bunks, though, it seemed a luxury flat. A blanket attached with wires to one of the overhead pipes gave some small semblance of privacy.

  In Yiddish, Rivka said, “When we went from Poland to England, I was afraid to be the only woman on a ship full of sailors. Now, though, I don’t worry. They aren’t like the Nazis. They don’t take advantage.”

  Moishe thought about that. After a little while, he said, “We’re on the same side as the English. That makes a difference. To the Nazis, we were fair game.”

  “What’s ‘fair game’ mean?” Reuven asked. He remembered the ghetto as a time of hunger and fear, but he’d been away from it most of a year now. In the life of a little boy, that was a long time. His scars had healed. Moishe wished his own dreadful memories would go away as readily.

  After being submerged for what he thought was most of a day—though time in tight, dark places had a way of slipping away from you if you didn’t hold it down—the Seanymph surfaced. Hatches let in fresh air to replace the stale stuff everyone had been breathing over and over again. They also let in shafts of sunlight that clove straight through the gloom inside the submarine. No winter sun in London or Warsaw could have shone so bright.

  “We’ll lay over in Gibraltar to recharge our batteries and pick up whatever fresh produce they have for us here,” Commander Stansfield told Moishe. “Then we’ll submerge again and go on into the Mediterranean to rendezvous with the vessel that will take you on to Palestine.” He frowned “That’s what the plan is, at any rate. The Lizards are strong around much of the Mediterranean. If they’ve been as vigorous attacking ships there as elsewhere—”

  “What do we do then?” Moishe asked.

  Stansfield grimaced. “I don’t precisely know. I gather your mission is of considerable importance: it must be, or it wouldn’t have been laid on. But I’ve neither fuel nor supplies to take you there, I’m afraid, and I don’t really know where I should acquire more. Here, possibly, though I should have to get authority from London first. Let us hope it does not come to that.”

  “Yes,” Moishe said. “Let us.”

  He and his family stretched their legs on the deck of the Seanymph a few times while she resupplied. The sun beat down on them with a vigor it seldom found in summer in more northerly climes. Like those of the sailors, their skins were fish-belly pale. Before long, they began to turn pink.

  The Germans and Italians had bombed Gibraltar, back when the war was a merely human affair. The Lizards had bombed it since, more persistently and more precisely. Nonetheless, it remained in British hands. No great warships used the harbor, as they had in earlier days, but Moishe spotted a couple of other submarines. One looked considerably different in lines from the Seanymph. He wondered if it was even a British boat. Could the Axis powers be using a harbor they’d tried to destroy?

  When the crew dogged the hatches, Moishe felt a pang, as if he were being dragged unwilling into a cave. After the spirited Mediterranean sun, the dim interior lamps seemed particularly distressing. A couple of hours later, though, he’d got used to the orange twilight once more.

  Time crawled on. The sailors were all either asleep or busy keeping the submarine running. Moishe had slept as much as he could, and he was useless on the boat. That left him as bored as he’d ever been in his life. In the bunker under the Warsaw ghetto flats, he’d passed a lot of time making love with Rivka. He couldn’t do that here.

  Keeping Reuven out of mischief helped occupy him. His son was every bit as bored as he was, and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to go out and get under people’s feet “It’s not fair!” he said, again and again. He was probably right, but not right enough to be turned loose.

  The Seanymph sailed east, altogether cut off from the outside world. Moishe wondered if traveling between worlds in a Lizard spaceship was anything like this. If it was, he pitied the Lizards. They had to endure it for a lot longer than mere hours.

  When the submarine surfaced, it was black night outside. That made transferring Moishe and his family safer, but also harder. “Like trying to find a black cat in a coal cellar at midnight,” Commander Stansfield grumbled. “And we’re not even certain the cat is here.”

  “How well can you find where you are going when this ship is underwater?” Russie asked.

  “Boat,” Stansfield corrected absently. “That is the rub, of course. If we’re a couple—or more than a couple—of miles from where we ought to be, we might as well have sailed to Colorado.” He smiled, as if at some remembered joke. Whatever it was, it made no sense to Moishe. Stansfield went on, “It’s a clear night. We can read our positions from the stars and move at need. But dawn will be coming before too long—now that we’re further south, night ends earlier than it would in British waters—and I’m not keen on being spotted around here.”

  “No. I understand this,” Moishe said. “Can you sail back to Gibraltar all under the sea?”

  “We’ll use the diesels to charge the batteries,” the Royal Navy man answered. After a moment, Russie realized that wasn’t a fully responsive reply. The Seanymph had sailed into danger to take him and his family where they were supposed to go.

  Stansfield was getting out the sextant when a sailor came down from the conning tower and said, “Sir, we’ve spotted a ship maybe half a mile to port. No sign she knows we’re anywhere about. Is that the one we want?”

  “It’s not likely to be anybody else,” Stansfield said. “And if it happens to be, he won’t go telling tales out of school. We’ll make certain of that.” Moishe hadn’t heard the idiom before, and needed a moment to figure out what it meant. Yes, Stansfield was a military man—he talked with complete equanimity of killing people.

  The Seanymph glided quietly toward the waiting ship. Moishe wished he could go up on deck to help, but realized he would be as much underfoot there as Reuven was down below. He hated waiting for others to decide his fate. That had happened too often in his life, and here it was again.

  Shoes clattered on the rungs of the iron ladder that led up to the conning tower. “Captain’s compliments, sir, ma’am,” a sailor said, “and please to get your things and come along with me.” He actually said fings and wiv, but that didn’t bother Moishe, who had trouble with the th sound himself. He and Rivka grabbed their meager bundles of belongings and, shooing Reuven ahead of them, climbed up to the top of the conning tower.

  Moishe peered out into the darkness. A tramp steamer bobbed alongside the Seanymph. Even in the darkness, even to Moishe’s inexperienced eye, it looked old and dingy and battered. Commander Stansfield came over and pointed. “There she is,” he said. “That’s the Naxos. She’ll take you the rest of the way to the Holy Land. Good luck to you.” He held out a hand. Moishe shook it

  With a rattling of chains, the Naxos lowered a boat. Moishe helped his wife and son into it, then put in what they’d brought with them, and last of all climbed in himself. One of the sailors at the oars said something in a language he didn’t understand. To his amazement, Reuven answered in what sounded like the same language. The sailor leaned forward in
surprise, then threw back his head and shouted loud laughter.

  “What language are you speaking? Where did you learn it?” Moishe asked his son in Yiddish.

  “What do you mean, what language?” Reuven answered, also in Yiddish. “He uses the same words the Stephanopoulos twins did, so I used some of those words, too. I liked playing with them, even if they were goyim.”

  To Rivka, Moishe said, “He learned Greek.” He sounded almost accusing. Then he started to laugh. “I wonder if the Stephanopoulos boys speak Yiddish and surprise their mother.”

  “They were using some of my words, too, Papa,” Reuven said. “It’s all right, isn’t it?” He seemed anxious, perhaps afraid he’d revealed too much to his friends. In the ghetto, you quickly learned giving yourself away was dangerous.

  “It’s all right,” Moishe assured him. “It’s better than all right, in fact I’m proud of you for learning.” He scratched his head. “I just hope you won’t be the only one who can talk with these sailors.”

  When they got up onto the Naxos’ deck, the captain tried several languages with Moishe before discovering they had German in common. “Panagiotis Mavrogordato, that’s me,” he said, thumping his chest with a theatrical gesture. “They’re your enemies, they’re my enemies, and we have to use their tongue to talk with each other.” He spat on the deck to show what he thought of that.

  “Now the Lizards are everyone’s enemies,” Moishe said. The Greek rubbed his chin, dipped his head in agreement, and spat again.

  The Seanymph slid beneath the surface of the Mediterranean. That made the Naxos rock slightly in the water. Otherwise, there was no trace the submarine had ever been there. Moishe felt alone and very helpless. He’d trusted the British sailors. Who could say anything about the crew of a rusty Greek freighter? If they wanted to throw him over the side, they could. If they wanted to hand him to the first Lizards they saw, they could do that, too.

  As casually as he could, he asked, “Where do we go from here?”

  Mavrogordato started ticking off destinations on his fingers: “Rome, Athens, Tarsus, Haifa. At Haifa, you get off.”

  “But . . . ?” Was Mavrogordato trying to bluff him? “Rome is in the Lizards’ hands. Most of Italy is.”

  “That’s why we go there.” Mavrogordato mimed licking something from the palm of his hand. “The Lizards there will be mighty gamemeno glad to see us, too.”

  Moishe didn’t know what gamemeno meant. Reuven let out a shocked gasp and then a giggle, which told him what sort of word it was likely to be—not that he hadn’t figured that out for himself. Even without the word, he understood what the Greek was talking about. So he was running ginger, was he? In that case, the aliens would be glad to see him—and he was less likely to turn over a family of Jews to Lizard officialdom.

  Mavrogordato went on, “They give us all kinds of interesting things in exchange for the”—he made that tasting gesture again—“we bring them, yes they do. We would have had a profitable trip already. And when the British paid us to carry you, too—” He bunched his fingertips together and kissed them. Russie had never seen anybody do that before, but he didn’t need a dictionary for it, either.

  The captain of the Naxos led them to their cabin. It had one narrow bed for him and Rivka, with a pallet on the floor for Reuven. It was cramped and untidy. Next to the accommodations aboard the Seanymph they’d just left, it seemed like a country estate.

  “Don’t turn on the light at night unless you shut the door and pull the blackout curtain over the porthole first,” Mavrogordato said. “If you make a mistake about that, we will be very unhappy with you, no matter how much the British paid us for you. Do you understand?” Without waiting for an answer, he squatted and spoke in slow, careful Greek to Reuven.

  “Nee, nee,” Reuven said—that’s what it sounded like to Moishe, anyhow. His son was obviously impatient at being talked down to, and added, “Malakas,” under his breath.

  Mavrogordato’s eyes went wide. He started to laugh. Getting to his feet in a hurry, he said, “This is a fine boy you have here. He will make a fine man if you can keep from strangling him first. We’ll have rolls and bad tea for breakfast in a couple of hours, when the sun rises. Come join us then.” With a last dip of his head, he went out of the cabin.

  Rivka shut the door and used the blackout curtain. Then she clicked on the light switch. A ceiling bulb in a cage of iron bars lit up the metal cubicle. The cage was much like the ones aboard the Seanymph. The bulb, though, made Moishe squint and his eyes water. It wasn’t—it couldn’t have been—as bright as Gibraltar sunshine, but it seemed that way.

  Moishe looked around the cabin. It didn’t take long. But for rivets and peeling paint and a couple of streaks of rust, there wasn’t much to see. In his mind’s eye, though, he looked farther ahead. “Halfway there,” he said.

  “Halfway there,” Rivka echoed.

  “Mama, Papa, I have to make a pish,” Reuven said.

  Moishe took his hand. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll find out where you do that here.”

  Ussmak was dressed in more clothes than he’d ever worn in his life. Back on Home, he hadn’t worn anything beyond body paint and belts hung with pouches. That was the way you were supposed to go through life. But if he went out that door as if he were on Home, he’d freeze to death before he ever got to his landcruiser.

  He turned an eye turret down toward the large, heavy gloves on his hands. “How are we supposed to do any sort of work on the machine in clumsy things like these?” he complained, not for the first time. “My grip has about as much precision as if I were using my tailstump.”

  “We have to maintain the landcruiser, no matter how hard it is,” Nejas answered. The landcruiser commander was bundled up as thoroughly as Ussmak. “It has to be perfect in every way—no speck of dirt, no slightest roughness in the engine. If the least little thing goes wrong, the Big Uglies will swoop down and kill us before we even know they’re around.” He paused, then added, “I want a taste of ginger.”

  “So do I, superior sir,” Ussmak said. He knew he’d probably saved Nejas’ life by giving him ginger when he was wounded in the invasion of Britain. But ginger fit Nejas’ personality only too well. He’d been a perfectionist before; now the least little flaw sent him into a rage. The herb also exaggerated his tendency to worry about everything and anything, especially after he’d been without it for a while.

  A lot of males in this Emperor-forsaken frozen Soviet wasteland were like that. But for going on patrol and servicing their land-cruisers, they had nothing to do but sit around in the barracks and watch video reports on how the conquest of Tosev 3 was going. Even when couched in broadcasters’ cheerily optimistic phrases, those reports were plenty of incitement for any male in his right mind to worry about anything and everything.

  “Superior sir, will this planet be worth having, once the war of conquest is over?” Ussmak asked. “The way things are going now, there won’t be much left to conquer.”

  “Ours is not to question those who set strategy. Ours is to obey and carry out the strategy they set,” Nejas answered; like any proper male of the Race, he was as good a subordinate as a commander.

  Maybe it was all the ginger Ussmak had tasted, maybe all the crewmales he’d seen killed, maybe just his sense that the Race’s broadcasters hadn’t the slightest clue about what the war they were describing was really like. Whatever it was, he didn’t feel like a proper male any more. He said, “Meaning no disrespect to the fleetlord and those who advise him, superior sir, but too much of what they’ve tried just hasn’t worked. Look what happened to us in Britain. Look at the poisonous gas and the atomic bombs the Big Uglies are using against us.”

  Skoob was also climbing into the gear a male needed to survive in Siberia, the gear that turned quick death into prolonged discomfort. The gunner spoke in reproving tones: “The leaders know better than we what needs doing to finish the conquest of Tosev 3. Isn’t that right, superior sir?” He tur
ned confidently to Nejas.

  Skoob had come through the British campaign unwounded; he’d also managed to keep from sticking his tongue in the powdered ginger, though he turned his eye turrets the other way when his crewmales tasted. But for that toleration, though, he still seemed as innocent of the wiles of the Tosevites as all the males of the Race had been when the ships of the conquest fleet first came to Tosev 3. In a way, Ussmak envied him that. He himself had changed, and change for the Race was always unsettling, disorienting.

  Nejas had changed, too—not as much as Ussmak, but he’d changed. With a hissing sigh, he said, “Gunner, sometimes I wonder what is in the fleetlord’s mind. I obey—but I wonder.”

  Skoob looked at him as if he’d betrayed their base to the Russkis. He sought solace in work: “Well, superior sir, let’s make sure the landcruiser is in proper running order. If it lets us down, we won’t be able to obey our superiors ever again.”

  “Truth,” Nejas said. “I don’t want to quarrel with you or upset you, Skoob, but I don’t want to lie to you, either. You’d think I was talking out of a video screen if I tried it.” He didn’t think much of the relentless good news that kept coming from the fighting fronts either, then.

  Trying to keep the landcruiser operational was a never-ending nightmare. It would have been a nightmare even had Ussmak himself been warm. Frozen water in all varieties got in between road wheels and tracks and chassis and cemented them to one another. The intense cold made some metals brittle. It also made lubricants less than enthusiastic about doing their proper job. Engine wear had been heavy since the landcruiser was airlifted here, and spare parts were in constantly short supply.

  As he thawed out the cupola lid so it would open and close, Ussmak said, “Good thing we have those captured machine tools to make some of our own spares. If it weren’t for that and for cannibalizing our wrecks, we’d never keep enough machines in action.”