Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  What he’d told the Lizard was indeed true. From everything he’d heard, the troops around Pskov treated Lizard prisoners far better than the Germans had treated their Russian captives, or vice versa. Being hard to come by, Lizard prisoners were valuable. The Nazis and Reds had had plenty of chances to take each other’s measure.

  “In return for giving these wounded males back to the Race, you want what?” Nikeaa asked, and made a queer coughing noise that sounded like something left over from his own language. “We also have captives, Germans and Russians. We have no Britainish here, this I tell you. We do not harm these captured ones after we have them. We give them for yours. We give ten for one. If you like.”

  “Not enough,” Bagnall said.

  “Then we give twenty for one,” Nikeaa said. Bagnall had heard from others who’d dealt with the Lizards that they were not good bargainers. Now he saw what they’d meant. Human negotiators would not have backpedaled so readily.

  “Still not enough,” he said. “Along with the soldiers, we want a hundred of your books or films, and two of your machines that play the films, along with working batteries for them.”

  Nikeaa drew back in alarm. “You want us to give you our secrets?” He made that coughing noise again. “It cannot be.”

  “No, no. You misunderstand,” Bagnall said hastily. “We know you will not give us any military manuals or things of that sort. We want your novels, your stories, whatever science you have that will not let us build weapons with what we learn from it. Give us these things and we will be content.”

  “If you cannot use them immediately, why do you want them?” Reading tone into a Lizard’s voice probably told you more about yourself than about the Lizard, but Bagnall thought Nikeaa sounded suspicious. The alien went on, “This is not how Tosevites usually behave.” Yes, he was suspicious.

  “We want to learn more about your kind,” Bagnall answered. “Eventually, this war will end, and your people and mine will live side by side.”

  “Yes. You will be our subjects,” Nikeaa said flatly.

  But Bagnall shook his head. “Not necessarily. If your conquest were as easy as you’d thought it was going to be, it would have been finished by now. You’ll need to be dealing with us more nearly as equals at least until the end of the war, and maybe afterwards as well. And we with you-the same does apply. I gather you’ve been studying us for a long time. We’re just beginning to learn about you.”And most of what we have learned I don’t fancy.

  “I have not the authority to decide this on my own,” Nikeaa said. “It is not a demand we were prepared for, and so I must consult with my superiors before replying.”

  “If you must, then you must,” Bagnall said; he’d already noted-and he was sure he was far from the only one who had-that the Lizards were not good at deciding things on the spur of the moment.

  He’d tried to put disappointment in his own voice when he replied, though he doubted whether Nikeaa recognized it. Even inserting it wasn’t easy. If the Lizards did come up with the books and films and readers, they wouldn’t stay in Pskov. Half of them would go to Moscow, the other half to… no, not to Berlin, which was ruined, but to some town in Germany. The NKVD, no doubt, would pore over one set, and theGestapo over the other. No matter how much he wanted mankind to defeat the Lizards, Bagnall had a devil of a time finding much enthusiasm for the notion of the Bolsheviks and Nazis getting a leg up on England and the United States in understanding the alien invaders. He’d seen Hitler and Stalin’s men in action, and had more often been horrflied than impressed.

  Nikeaa said, “I will report this condition of yours and will make my reply when my superiors determine what the correct response should be. Shall we meet again in fifteen days? I hope to have their decision by that time.”

  “I had not expected so long a delay,” Bagnall said.

  “Decisions should not be made hastily, especially those of such importance,” Nikeaa said. Was that reproach he was trying to convey? Bagnall had trouble being sure. The Lizard added, “We are not Tosevites, after all, to rush into everything.” Yes, reproach, or perhaps just scorn.

  “Fifteen days, then,” Bagnall said, and made for the woods where his escort-a mixed party, or rather two separate parties, one German, the other Russian-awaited his return. He glanced back over his shoulder. Nikeaa was hurrying away toward his own folk. Bagnall’s sigh sent a plume of fog out ahead of him. But for Ken Embry the pilot and Jerome Jones the radarman, his folk were far from Pskov.

  Captain Martin Borcke was holding Bagnall’s horse. TheWehrmacht man spoke fluent English; Bagnall thought he was in Intelligence, but wasn’t certain. In English, he asked, “Have we got the exchange agreement?”

  Bagnall wished Borcke hadn’t used English, as if expecting a reply in the same tongue-one the Russians did not know. Keeping the two alleged allies from each other’s throats was anything but easy. The RAF man answered in German, which many of the Red Army men could follow: “No, we have no agreement yet. The Lizards need to talk to their superiors before they decide whether they can give us the books we want.”

  The Russians accepted that as a matter of course. To their way of thinking, moving an inch past the orders you had was dangerous. If anything went wrong, the blame landed squarely on you. Borcke snorted in contempt; theWehrmacht let people do more thinking for themselves. “Well, it can’t be helped,” he said, and then turned that into Russian:“Nichevo.”

  “Nichevo, da,”Bagnall said, and swung up onto the horse. Riding it wasn’t as pleasant as being in a heated motorcar, but it did keep his legs and thighs warm. That was something. He hadn’t been on horseback above half a dozen times before he came to Pskov. Now he sometimes felt ready to ride in the Derby. Intellectually, he knew that wasn’t so, but the strides he had made in equitation encouraged him in the fancy.

  After a cold night encampment, he got back into Pskov the next afternoon. He went over to theKrom, the medieval stone castle, to report the delay to Lieutenant General Kurt Chill and to Brigadiers Nikolai Vasiliev and Aleksandr German, the German and Russian officers commanding in the city. With them, as he’d expected, he found Ken Embry. The RAF men, being relatively disinterested, served as lubricant betweenWehrmacht and Red Army personnel.

  After Bagnall made his report, he and Embry headed back to the wooden house they shared with Jerome Jones. When they drew near, they heard a dish shatter with a crash, and then angry voices, two men’s and a woman’s, shouting loudly.

  “Oh, bugger, that’s Tatiana!” Ken Embry exclaimed.

  “You’re right,” Bagnall said. They both started to run. Panting, Bagnall added, “Why the devil couldn’t she leave Jones alone after she took up with that Jerry?”

  “Because that would have been convenient,” Embry answered. Ever since he’d been pilot and Bagnall flight engineer aboard their Lancaster, they’d had a contest to see who could come up with the most casually cynical understatements. For the moment, Embry had taken the lead.

  Bagnall, though, was a better runner, and got to the door a couple of strides ahead of his comrade. He would willingly have forgone the honor. All the same, he threw the door open and rushed inside, Embry right behind him.

  Georg Schultz and Jerome Jones stood almost nose-to-nose, screaming at each other. Off to one side, Tatiana Pirogova had a plate in her hand, ready to fling. By the shards, she’d thrown the last one at Jones. That didn’t mean this one wouldn’t fly at Schultz’s head. At that, Bagnall was glad Tatiana was still flinging crockery instead of reaching for the scope-sighted Mosin-Nagant sniper’s rifle she wore slung on her back.

  She was a striking woman: blond, blue-eyed, shapely-altogether lovely. If face and body were all you cared about. She’d made advances to Bagnall, not so long ago. That she’d been Jones’ lover at the time hadn’t been the only reason he’d declined. It would have been like bedding a she-leopard-probably fun while it lasted, but you could never afford to turn your back afterward.

  “Shut up, all
of you!” he shouted now, first in English, then in German, and finally in Russian. The three squabblers didn’t shut up, of course; they started yelling at him instead. He thought the fair Tatiana was going to let fly with that plate, but she didn’t, not quite.Good sign, he thought. Having them scream at him was another good sign. Since he wasn’t(thank God!) sleeping with any of them, they might be slower to get lethally angry at him.

  Behind him, Ken Embry said, “What the devil is going on here?” He used the same mixture of Russian and German he did with Lieutenant General Chill and the Russian partisan brigadiers. Their squabbles sometimes came near to blows, too.

  “This bastard’s still fucking my woman!” Georg Schultz shouted, pointing at Jerome Jones.

  “I am not your woman. I give my body to whom I please,” Tatiana answered, just as hotly.

  “I don’t want your body,” Jerome Jones yelled in pretty fluent Russian; he’d studied the language in his undergraduate days at Cambridge. He was a thin, clever-looking fellow in his early twenties, about as tall as Schultz but not nearly so solidly made. He went on, “Christ and the saints, how many times do I have to tell you that?”

  His picturesque oath meant nothing to Tatiana, or even less. She spat on the floorboards. “That for Christ and the saints! I am a Soviet woman, free of such superstitious twaddle. And if I want you again, little man, I will have you.”

  “What about me?” Schultz said, like the others conducting the argument at the top of his lungs.

  “This will be even more delightful to mediate than the generals’ brawls,” Bagnall murmured in an aside to Ken Embry.

  Embry nodded, then grinned impudently. “It’s rather more entertaining to listen to, though, isn’t it?”

  “-have been sleeping with you,” Tatiana was saying, “so you have no cause for complaint. I do this even though, last time you got on top of me, you called me Ludmila instead of my own name.”

  “I what?” Schultz said. “I never-”

  “You did,” Tatiana said with a certainty that could not be denied-and an obvious malicious pleasure in that certainty. “You can still think about that soft little Red Air Force pilot you pined for like a puppy with its tongue hanging out, but if I think of anyone else, it’s like you think your poor mistreated cock will fall off. If you think I mistreat your cock when it’s in there, it can stay out.” She turned to Jones, swinging her hips a little and running her tongue over her lips to make them fuller and redder. Bagnall could see exactly what she was doing, but that didn’t mean he was immune to it.

  Neither was the British radarman. He took half a step toward Tatiana, then stopped with a very visible effort. “No, dammit!” he yelled. “This is how I got into trouble in the first place.” He paused and looked thoughtful, so well that Bagnall wondered if the expression was altogether spontaneous. And when Jones spoke again, he made a deliberate effort to turn the subject: “Haven’t seen Ludmila about for the past few days. She’s overdue from her last flight, isn’t she?”

  “Ja,”Schultz said. His head bobbed up and down. “She flew last to Riga, and should have been back soon.”

  “No, not necessarily,” Bagnall said. “General Chill got a message answering whatever query he’d sent with her, and saying also that the soldier commanding in Riga was taking advantage of her light airplane for some mission of his own.” Now he had trouble keeping his face straight. He’d been interested in Ludmila Gorbunova, too, but she hadn’t been interested back.

  “Ah, that is good; that is very good,” Schultz said. “I had not heard it.”

  Tatiana started to smash the plate over his head. He was fast; he knocked it out of her hand so that it flew across the room, hit the timbers of the wall, and broke there. Tatiana cursed him in Russian and in the bad German she’d picked up. When she’d run through all her invective once-and the choicer bits twice-she shouted, “Since no one cares about me, to the devil’s uncle with the lot of you.” She stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind her loud enough, probably, to make the neighbors think an artillery round had hit it there.

  Georg Schultz surprised Bagnall by starting to laugh. Then Schultz, a farmerly type, surprised him again by quoting Goethe:“Die ewige Weibliche- the eternal feminine.” The German shook his head. “I don’t know why I get myself into such a state over her, but I do.”

  “Must be love,” Ken Embry said innocently.

  “God forbid!” Schultz looked around at the shattered crockery. “Ah, the hell with it.” His gaze fixed on Jerome Jones. “And the hell with you, too,Englander.”

  “From you, that’s a compliment,” Jones said. Bagnall took a step over to the radarman’s side. If Schultz wanted to try anything, he wouldn’t be going against Jones alone.

  But the German shook his head again, rather like a bear be deviled by bees, and left the house. He didn’t slam the door as hard as Tatiana had, but broken pieces of dishes jumped all the same. Bagnall took a deep breath. The scene hadn’t been as bad as combat, but it hadn’t been any fun, either. He clapped Jerome Jones on the back. “How the devil did you ever get tangled up with that avalanche who walks like a man?”

  “The fair Tatiana?” Now Jones shook his head-ruefully. “She doesn’t walk like a man. She walks like a woman-that was the problem.”

  “And she doesn’t want to give you up, even though she has her dashing Nazi, too?” Bagnall said.Dashing wasn’t the right word to describe Georg Schultz, and he knew it.Capable fit pretty well.Dangerous was in there, too, perhaps not as overtly as with Tatiana Pirogova, but part of the mix nonetheless.

  “That’s about it,” Jones muttered.

  “Tell her to go away often enough and she’ll eventually get the message, old man,” Bagnall said. “You dowant her to go away, don’t you?”

  “Most of the time, of course I do,” Jones answered. “But sometimes, when I’m-you know-” He glanced down at the crockery-strewn floor and didn’t go on.

  Bagnall did it for him: “When you’re randy, you mean.” Jones nodded miserably. Bagnall looked at Ken Embry. Embry was looking at him. They both groaned.

  The coming of the Lizards had brought ruin to hundreds of towns for every one it helped. Lamar, Colorado, though, was one of the latter. The prairie town, a no-account county seat before the aliens invaded, had become a center for the defense against them. People and supplies had flowed into it rather than streaming away, as was the usual case.

  Captain Rance Auerbach thought about that as he watched mutton chops sizzle on the grill of a local cafe. The fire that made them sizzle was fueled by dried horse dung: not much in the way of timber around Lamar, and coal was in short supply and natural gas unavailable. There were, however, plenty of horses around-Auerbach himself wore a cavalry captain’s bars.

  A waitress with a prizefighter’s beefy arms set down three mugs of home brew and a big bowl of boiled beets-beets being one of the leading local crops. She too glanced at the chops. “Uh-huh,”she said, as much to herself as to Auerbach. “Timed that about right-those’ll be ready in just a couple minutes.”

  Auerbach slid one of the mugs of beer down the counter to Rachel Hines, who sat on his left, and the other to Penny Summers, who sat on his right He raised his own mug. “Confusion to the Lizards!” he said.

  “Hell with ’em,” Penny agreed, and gulped down half of what her mug held. With her flat Midwestern accent, she could have been a native of Lamar; Auerbach’s Texas drawl proclaimed him an outsider every time he opened his mouth. Neither Penny nor Rachel was from Lamar, though. Auerbach and his men had rescued both of them from Lakin, Kansas, when his company raided the base the Lizards had set up there.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Penny Summers softly echoed, “Confusion to the Lizards,” and also sipped at her beer. She did everything softly and slowly these days. In the escape from Lakin, her father had been blown to sloppily butchered raw meat before her eyes. She’d never been quite the same since.

  The waitress went around the counter,
stabbed the mutton chops with a long-handled fork, and slapped them onto plates. “There y’go, folks,” she said. “Eat hearty-y’never know when you’ll get another chance.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Rachel Hines said. She attacked the mutton with knife and fork. Her blue eyes glowed as she gulped down a big bite. She hadn’t been the same since she got out of Lakin, either, but she hadn’t withdrawn into herself the way Penny had. These days, she wore the same khaki uniform Auerbach did, though with a PFC’s single chew on rather than his captain’s badges. She made a pretty fair trooper; she could ride, she could shoot, she didn’t mouth off (too much), and the rest of the company paid her what had to be the ultimate compliment: for the most part, they treated her like one of the boys.

  She cut off another bite, frowning a little as she transferred the fork to her left hand so she could use the knife. “How’s your finger doing?” Auerbach asked.

  Rachel looked down at her hand. “Still missing,” she reported, and spread the hand so he could see the wide gap between middle finger and pinkie. “Now if I’d been shot by a Lizard, it would have been one thing,” she said. “Having that crazy son of a bitch nail me, though, that just makes me mad. But it could have been worse, I expect, so I’ve got no real kick coming.”

  Few men Auerbach knew could have talked about a wound so dispassionately. If Rachel was one of the guys, she was a better one than most. Auerbach said, “That Larssen fellow was supposed to be going over to the Lizards with stuff they weren’t supposed to know. He’d shot two men dead, too. He had what he got when we caught up with him coming, you ask me. I’m just sorry we took casualties bringing him down.”

  “Wonder what it was he knew,” Rachel Hines said.

  Auerbach shrugged. His troopers had been asking that question since the order to hunt down Larssen came out of Denver. He didn’t know the answer, but he could make some pretty fair guesses, ones he didn’t share. Back a while before, he’d led the cavalry escort that got Leslie Groves into Denver, and Groves had been carrying something-he wouldn’t say what-he treated as just a little more important than the Holy Grail. If it didn’t have something to do with the atomic bombs that had knocked the Lizards for a couple of loops, Auerbach would have been mightily surprised.