Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Groves chewed on that for a minute or so before he tried answering. It was another good question, but also another open-ended one: he didn’t know what Hull did or didn’t know. At last, he said, “Mr. President, it could be that nobody’s told you we’ve detached one of our physicists from the facility and sent him off to the Soviet Union to help the Russians with their atomic project.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.” Hull clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Why do the Russians need help? They set off their atomic bomb before we did, before the Germans, before anybody.”

  “Yes, sir, but they had help.” Groves explained how the Russians had built that bomb out of nuclear material captured from the Lizards, and how some of that same material had also helped the Germans and the United States. He finished, “But we-and the Nazis, too, by the look of things-have been able to figure out how to make more plutonium on our own. The Russians don’t seem to have managed that.”

  “Isn’t that interesting?” Hull said. “Under any other circumstances, I can’t think of anybody I’d less rather see with the atomic bomb than Stalin-unless it’s Hitler.” He laughed unhappily. “And now Hitler has it, and if we don’t help Stalin, then odds are the Lizards beat him. All right, we’re helping him blow the Lizards to kingdom come. If we win that one, then we worry about him trying to blow us to kingdom come, too. Meanwhile, I don’t see what choice we have but to help him. What else is there that I ought to know?”

  “That was the most important thing I could think of, sir,” Groves said, and then, a moment later, “May I ask you a question, Mr. President?”

  “Go ahead and ask,” Hull said. “I reserve the right not to answer.”

  Groves nodded. “Of course. I was just wondering… It’s 1944, sir. How are we going to hold an election this November with the Lizards occupying so much of our territory?”

  “We’ll probably hold it the same way we held Congressional elections November before last,” Hull answered, “which is to say, we probably won’t. The officials we have will go on doing their jobs for the duration, and that looks like it will include me.” He snorted. “I’m going to stay unelected a good while longer, General. It’s not the way I’d like it, but it’s the way things are. If we win this war, the Supreme Court is liable to have a field day afterwards. But if we lose it, what those nine old men in black robes think will never matter again. I’ll take the chance of their crucifying me, so long as I can put them in a position of being able to do so. What do you think of that, General?”

  “From an engineering standpoint, it strikes me as the most economical solution, sir,” Groves answered. “I don’t know for a fact whether it’s the best one.”

  “I don’t, either,” Hull said, “but it looks like it’s what we’re going to do. The old Romans had dictators in emergencies, and they always thought the best ones were the ones most reluctant to take over. I qualify there, no two ways about it.” He got to his feet. He wasn’t very young and he wasn’t very spry, but he did manage. Again, seeing a President not only upright but mobile in that position reminded Groves things would never be the same again.

  “Good luck, sir,” he said.

  “Thank you, General; I’ll take all of that I can get.” Hull started to walk toward the door, then stopped and looked back at Groves. “Do you remember what Churchill told Roosevelt when Lend-Lease was just getting rolling? ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job.’ That’s what the United States needs from the Metallurgical Laboratory. Give us the tools.”

  “You’ll have them,” Groves promised.

  The white cliffs of Dover stretched a long way, and curved as they did. If one-or even two-walked along them, that one-or those two-could look down at the sea crashing against the base of those cliffs. David Goldfarb had read somewhere that. If the wave action continued with no other factor to check it, in some millions of years-he couldn’t remember how many-the British Isles would disappear and the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic commingle.

  When he said that aloud, Naomi Kaplan raised an eyebrow. “The British Isles have plenty of things to worry about before millions of years go by,” she said.

  The wind from off the North Sea tried to blow her words away. It did the same for her hat. She saved that with a quick grab and set it more firmly on her head. Goldfarb didn’t know whether to be glad she’d caught it or sorry he hadn’t had the chance to be gallant and chase it down. Of course, the wind might have turned and flung it over the cliff, which wouldn’t have done his chances for gallantry much good.

  Feigning astonishment, he said, “Why, what ever can you mean? Just because we’ve been bombed by the Germans and invaded by the Lizards in the past few years?” He waved airily. “Mere details. Now. If we’d had one of those atomic bombs or whatever they’re called dropped on us, the way Berlin did-”

  “God forbid,” Naomi said. “You’re right; we’ve been through quite enough already.”

  Her accent-upper-crust British laid over German-fascinated him (a good many things about her fascinated him, but he concentrated on the accent for the moment). It was a refined version of his own: lower-middle-class English laid over the Yiddish he’d spoken till he started grammar school.

  “I hope you’re not too chilly,” he said. The weather was brisk, especially so close to the sea, but not nearly so raw as it had been earlier in the winter. You no longer needed to be a wild-eyed optimist to believe spring would get around to showing up one of these days, even if not right away.

  Naomi shook her head. “No, it’s all right,” she said. As if to give the lie to her words, the wind tried to flip up the plaid wool skirt she wore. She smiled wryly as she grabbed at it to keep it straight. “Thank you for inviting me to go walking with you.”

  “Thanks for coming,” he answered. A lot of the chaps who visited the White Horse Inn had invited Naomi to go walking with them; some had invited her to do things a great deal cruder than that. She’d turned everybody down-except Goldfarb. His own teeth were threatening to chatter, but he wouldn’t admit even to himself that he was cold.

  “It is-pleasant-here,” Naomi said, picking the adjective with care. “Before I came to Dover, I had never seen, never imagined, cliffs like this. Mountains I knew in Germany, but never cliffs at the edge of the land, straight down for a hundred meters and more and then nothing but the sea.”

  “Glad you like them,” Goldfarb said, as pleased as if he were personally responsible for Dover’s most famous natural feature. “It’s hard to find a nice place to take a girl these days-no cinema without electricity, for instance.”

  “And how many girls did you take to the cinema and other nice places when there was electricity?” Naomi asked. She might have made the question sound teasing. David would have been easier about it if she had. But she sounded both curious and serious.

  He couldn’t fob her off with a light, casual answer, either. If he tried that, she could get the straight goods-or a large chunk of them-from Sylvia. He hadn’t taken Sylvia to the cinema, either; he’d taken her to bed. She was friendly enough to him now when he dropped into the White Horse Inn for a pint, but he couldn’t guess what sort of character she’d give him if Naomi asked. He’d heard women could be devastatingly candid when they talked with each other about men’s shortcomings.

  When be didn’t answer right away, Naomi cocked her head to one side and gave him a knowing look that made him feel about two feet high. But, instead of pounding away at him on the point, as he’d expected her to do, she said, “Sylvia tells me you did something very brave to get one of your-was it a cousin? she wasn’t sure-out of Poland.”

  “Does she?” he said in glad surprise; maybe Sylvia hadn’t given him such a bad character after all. He shrugged; having been born in England, he’d taken as his own at least part of the notion of British reserve. But if Naomi already knew some of the story, telling more wouldn’t hurt. He went on, “Yes, my cousin is Moishe Russie. Remember? I told you that back at the pub.”
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br />   She nodded. “Yes, you did. The one who broadcast on the wireless for the Lizards-and then against them after he’d seen what they truly were.”

  “That’s right,” Goldfarb said. “And they caught him, too, and clapped him in gaol in Lodz till they figured out what to do with him. I went over with a few other chaps and helped get him out and spirited him back here to England.”

  “You make it sound so simple,” Naomi said. “Weren’t you frightened?”

  That fight had been his first taste of ground combat, even if it had only been against Lizard and Polish prison guards too taken by surprise to put up all the resistance they might have. Since then, he’d got sucked into the infantry when the Lizards invaded England. That had been much worse. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine why some men presumably in their right minds chose the infantry as a career.

  He realized he hadn’t answered Naomi’s question. “Frightened?” he said. “As a matter of fact, I was ruddy petrflied.”

  To his relief, she nodded again; he’d been afraid his candor would put her off. “When you tell me things like this,” she said, “you remind me you are not an Englishman after all. Not many English soldiers would admit to anyone who is not one of their-what do you call them? — their mates, that is it-that they feel fear or much of anything else.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen that,” Goldfarb said. “I don’t understand it, either.” He laughed. “But what do I know? I’m only a Jew whose parents got out of Poland. I won’t understand Englishmen down deep if I live to be ninety, which doesn’t strike me as likely, the way the world wags these days. Maybe my grandchildren will have the proper stiff upper lip.”

  “And my parents got me out of Germany just in time,” Naomi said. Her shiver had nothing to do with the sea breeze. “It was bad there, and we escaped before theKristallnacht. What-” She hesitated, perhaps nerving herself. After a moment, she finished the question: “What was it like in Poland?”

  Goldfarb considered that. “You have to remember, the Nazis had been out of Lodz for a year, more or less, before I went in there.” She nodded. He went on, “Keeping that in mind, I think about what I saw there and I try to imagine how it was when the Germans were there.”

  “Nu?”Naomi prodded.

  He sighed. His breath smoked in the chilly air. “From everything I saw, from everything I heard, there might not be any Jews left alive there by now if the Lizards hadn’t come. I didn’t see all of Poland, of course, only Lodz and the road to and from the sea, but there might not be any Jews left in the whole country if the Lizards hadn’t come. When the Germans saidJudenfrei, they weren’t joking.”

  Naomi bit her lip. “This is what I have heard on the wireless. Hearing it from someone I know who has seen it with his own eyes makes it more real.” Her frown deepened. “And the Germans, the wireless says, are pushing deeper into Poland again.”

  “I know. I’ve heard that, too. My friends-mygoyishe friends-cheer when they hear news like that. When I hear it, I don’t know what to think. The Lizards can’t win the war, but the bloody Nazis can’t, either.”

  “Shouldn’t,” Naomi said with the precision of one who had learned English from the outside instead of growing up with it. “They can. The Lizards can. The Germans can. They shouldn’t.” She laughed bitterly. “When I was a little girl going to school, before Hitler came to power, they taught me I was a German. I believed it, too. Isn’t that peculiar, thinking about it now?”

  “It’s more than peculiar. It’s-” Goldfarb groped for the word he wanted. “What do they call those strange paintings where it’s raining loaves of bread or you see a watch dribbling down a block as if it were made of ice and melting?”

  “Surreal,” Naomi said at once. “Yes, that is it. That is it exactly. Me-a German?” She laughed again, then stood to attention, her right arm rigidly outstretched.“Ein Volk ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!” she thundered in what wasn’t the worst imitation of Hitler he’d ever heard.

  He thought it was meant for a joke. Maybe she’d thought the same thing when she started it. But as her arm fell limp to her side, she stared at it as if it had betrayed her. Her whole body sagged. Her face twisted. She began to cry.

  Goldfarb took her in his arms. “It’s all right,” he said. It wasn’t all right. They both knew it wasn’t all right. But if you let yourself think too much about the way it was, how could you go on doing what needed doing? With that thought, David realized he was closer to understanding the British stiff upper lip than he’d imagined.

  Naomi clung to him as if he were a life preserver and she a sailor on a ship that had just taken a torpedo from a U-boat. He held her with something of the same desperation. When he tilted her face up to kiss her, he found her mouth waiting. She moaned deeply in her throat and put her hand on the back of his head, pulling him to her.

  It might have been the oddest kiss he’d ever known. It didn’t stir him to lust, as so many less emphatic kisses with girls about whom he cared less had done. Yet he was glad to have it and sorry when it was over. “I ought to walk you back to your digs,” he said.

  “Yes, maybe you should,” Naomi answered. “You can meet my mother and father. If you like.”

  He’d fought the Lizards gun to gun. Would he quail from such an invitation now? By the slimmest of margins, he didn’t. “Capital,” he said, doing his best to sound casual. Naomi slipped her arm in his and smiled up at him, as if he’d just passed a test. Maybe he had.

  A large group of dark-skinned Big Uglies formed ragged lines on a grassy meadow next to the Florida air base. Teerts watched another Tosevite of the same color stomp his way out in front of them. The pilot shivered. In his no-nonsense stride and fierce features, the Big Ugly with three stripes on each sleeve of his upper-body covering reminded him of Major Okamoto, who’d been his interpreter and keeper while the Nipponese held him captive.

  The male with the stripes on his sleeve shouted something in his own language. “Tenn-hut!” was what it sounded like to Teerts. The rest of the Tosevites sprang to stiff verticality, their arms pressed tight against their sides. Given Teerts’ forward-slung posture, that only made them seem more ridiculous to him, but it seemed to satisfy, or at least to mollify, the Big Ugly with the striped upper-body covering.

  That male shouted again, a whole string of gibberish this time. Teerts had picked up a good deal of Nipponese in captivity, but it didn’t help him understand the Florida locals. The Empire’s three worlds all used the same language; encountering a planet where tens of different tongues were spoken required a distinct mental leap for males of the Race.

  The dark-skinned Big Uglies marched this way and that across the grassy field, obeying the commands the male with the stripes gave them. Even their feet went back and forth in the same rhythm. When that didn’t happen, the male in command screamed abuse at those who were derelict. Teerts did not have to be a savant of other-species psychology to figure out that the commanding male was imperfectly pleased.

  He turned to another male of the Race who was also watching the Tosevites at their evolutions. The fellow wore the body paint of an Intelligence specialist. His equivalent rank was about the same as Teerts’. The pilot asked, “Can we truly trust these Big Uglies to fight on our behalf?”

  “Our analysis is that they will fight bravely,” the male from Intelligence said. “The other local Tosevites so mistreated them that they will see us as a superior alternative to the continued authority of the lighter-skinned Big Uglies.”

  Teerts tried to place the other male’s voice. “You are Aaatos, not so?” he asked hesitantly.

  “Truth,” the male answered. “And you are Teerts.” Unlike Teerts’, his voice held no doubts. If he didn’t know who was who around the base, he wouldn’t be earning his keep-or preserving Intelligence’s reputation for omniscience.

  That reputation had taken a beating since the Race came to Tosev 3. A lot of reputations had taken a beating since the Race came to Tosev 3. Teerts said, “I hope you will f
orgive me, but I will always be nervous in the presence of armed Big Uglies. We have given arms to the natives of other parts of this planet and, from what I have heard, the results have often left much to be desired.” He could think of no politer way to say that the Big Uglies had the habit of turning their guns against the Race.

  Aaatos said, “Truth,” again, but went on, “We are improving control procedures, and will not permit these Tosevites to travel independently in large numbers while under arms: we shall always use signflicant cadres of males of the Race with them. They are intended to supplement our security details, not to supplant them. Thus we shall not be troubled by embarrassments such as the ones you mention-the case of Poland springs prominently to mind.”

  “Poland-yes, that is one of the names I have heard,” Teerts said. He would have had trouble placing it on a map; but for Manchukuo and Nippon, which he knew in detail more intimate than he had ever wanted to acquire, his familiarity with Tosevite geography was limited.

  “Nothing like that can happen here,” Aaatos said, and gave an emphatic cough to show he meant it.

  “May you be proved correct.” Teerts let it go at that. What he had seen on Tosev 3 left him convinced of two things: that the Big Uglies were more devious than most males of the Race could grasp till they got their snouts rubbed in the fact, and that trying to convince those males of that fact before their snouts were rubbed in it was a losing proposition from the start.

  Out on the meadow, the Big Uglies marched and marched, now reversing their course, now shifting at right angles. The male with stripes on his sleeves marched right along with them, berating them into performance ever more nearly perfect. Eventually, all of their legs were moving as if under the control of a single organism.

  “This is intriguing to watch,” Teerts said to Aaatos, “but what is its function? Any males who implemented these tactics in actual ground combat would be quickly destroyed. Even I, a killercraft pilot, know males are supposed to spread wide and seek cover. This is only common sense.” He let his mouth fall open. “Not that common sense is common among the Big Uglies.”