Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “Go ahead,” Jager said. “I’m not an ostrich, to stick my head in the sand.”

  Skorzeny grinned at him. The scar on his cheek pulled half his face into a grimace that might have come from a gargoyle sitting somewhere high on a medieval cathedral-or maybe that was just Jager’s mind, pulling horror from the SS man’s words: “I’m going to set off the biggest damned nerve-gas bomb the world has ever seen, and I’m going to do it right in the middle of the Lodz ghetto. So what do you think of that? Are you a colonel, or just a scoutmaster in the wrong uniform?”

  “Fuck you, Skorzeny,” Jager said evenly. As the words came out of his mouth, he remembered a Jewish partisan who’d used that invitation about every other sentence. SS men had shot the Jew-Max, his name was-at a place called Babi Yar, outside of Kiev. They’d botched the job, or Max wouldn’t have had the chance to tell his story. God only knew how many they hadn’t botched.

  “That’s not an answer,” Skorzeny said, as immune to insult as a Lizard panzer was to machine-gun bullets. “Tell me what you think.”

  “I think it’s stupid,” Jager answered. “The Jews in Lodz have been helping us. If you start killing off the people who do that, you run out of friends in a hurry.”

  “Ahh, those bastards are playing both ends against the middle, and you know it as well as I do,” Skorzeny said. “They kiss whichever ass is closest to them. It doesn’t matter one way or the other, anyhow. I’ve got my orders, and I’m going to carry them out.”

  Jager came to attention and flipped up his right arm.“Heil Hitler!” he said.

  He had to give Skorzeny credit: the big bruiser recognized it was sarcasm, not acquiescence. Not only that, he thought it was funny. “Come on, don’t be a wet blanket,” he said. “We’ve been through a lot together, you and I. You can give me a lot of help this time, too.”

  “Yes, I’d make a splendid Jew,” Jager said, deadpan. “How long do you suppose a circumcision takes to heal up?”

  “You didn’t used to be such a smartmouth,” Skorzeny said, rocking back on his heels and sticking thumbs into trouser pockets so he looked like a young lout on a streetcorner. “Must be senility coming on, eh?”

  “If you say so. How am I supposed to help, though? I’ve never been inside Lodz. In fact, the offensive steered wide around it so we wouldn’t get bogged down in street fighting there. We can’t afford to go losing panzers to Molotov cocktails and things like that; we lose too many of them to the Lizards as is.”

  “Yeah, that’s the line you sent back to division, and division sent it back to army group headquarters, and the High Command bought it,” Skorzeny said with a nod. “Bully for you. Maybe you’ll get red stripes on your trousers like a General Staff officer.”

  “And it’s worked, too,” Jager said. “I saw more street fighting in Russia than I ever wanted. Nothing in the world chews up men and machines like that, and we don’t have them to waste.”

  “Ja, ja, ja,”Skorzeny said with exaggerated patience. He leaned forward and glared at Jager. “And I also happen to know that one of the reasons we swung around Lodz in two prongs is that you cut a deal with the Jewish partisans there. What do you have to say to that, Mr. General Staff Officer?”

  It might have stopped snowing, but it was anything but warm. All the same, Jager felt his face heat. If Skorzeny knew that, it was in an SS dossier somewhere… which did not bode well for his long-term survival, let alone his career. Even so, he answered as calmly as he could: “I say it was military necessity. This way, we have the partisans on our side and driving the Lizards crazy instead of the other way round. It’s worked out damned well, so you can take your ‘I also happen to know’ and flush it down the WC.”

  “Why? What does Winston Churchill want with it?” Skorzeny said with a leer. The joke would have been funnier if the Germans hadn’t been making it on the radio from the day Churchill became prime minister to the night the Lizards arrived. The SS man went on, “You have to understand, I don’t really give a damn. But it does mean you have connections with the Jews. You ought to be able to use those to help me get my little toy right to the center of town.”

  Jager stared at him. “And you pay me thirty pieces of silver afterwards, don’t you? I don’t throw away connections like that. I don’t murder them, either. Why not ask me to betray my own men while you’re at it?”

  “Thirty pieces of silver? That’s pretty good. Christ was a damn kike, too, remember. And a whole fat lot of good it did him. So.” Skorzeny studied Jager. “The more help we get from your little chums, the easier the job will be, and I’m in favor of easy jobs whenever I can get ’em. They pay me to risk my neck, but they don’t pay me to stick it out when I don’t have to.”

  This from a man who’d blown up a Lizard panzer by jumping onto it and throwing a satchel charge between turret and hull. Maybe Skorzeny called that a necessary sort of risk; Jager had no way of knowing. He said, “You touch off a nerve-gas bomb in there, you’re going to kill a lot of people who don’t have thing one to do with the war.”

  This time, Skorzeny’s laugh was rude. “You fought in Russia, same as I did. So what?” He thumped Jager in the chest with a forefinger. “Listen and listen good. I’m going to do this with you or without you. It’d make my life easier if it was with you. But my life has been tough before. If it’s tough again, believe me, I’ll cope. So what do you say?”

  “I don’t say anything right now,” Jager answered. “I’m going to have to think this one over.”

  “Sure. Go ahead.” Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down in a parody of sweet reason. “Think all you want. Just don’t take too long doing it.”

  The guard pointed a Sten gun at Moishe Russie’s middle. “Come on, get moving,” he said, his voice harsh and merciless.

  Russie rose from the cot in his cell. “The Nazis put me in the ghetto, the Lizards put me in gaol,” he said. “I never thought Jews would treat me the same way.”

  If he’d hoped to wound the guard, he was disappointed. “Life’s tough all over,” the fellow answered indifferently. He gestured with the submachine gun. “Now put it in gear.”

  He might have been an SS man. Moishe wondered if he’d learned his military manner from the genuine article. He’d seen that in Poland, after the Jews and Poles helped the Lizards chase out the Germans. Quite a few Jews, suddenly become soldiers, imitated the most impressive, most ferocious human warriors they’d known. If you tried pointing that out to them, though, you were liable to get yourself killed. Moishe maintained a prudent silence here.

  He didn’t know exactly wherehere was. Somewhere in Palestine, of course, but he and his family had been brought in tied and blindfolded and concealed under straw. The outer walls of the compound were too high for him to see over them. He could tell he was in a town from the noises that came through the golden sandstone: smiths pounding on metal, wagons rattling by, the distant babel of a marketplace. Wherever he was, he was surely walking on soil mentioned in the Torah. Whenever he remembered that, awe prickled through him.

  Most of the time, other things were on his mind. Chief among them was how to keep the Lizards from walking on this holy soil. He’d quoted the Bible at the Jewish underground leaders: Thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed. Isaiah had been talking about the Egyptians, and the Lizards were in Egypt now. Russie didn’t want them to follow Moses across the Sinai and into Palestine.

  Very few people cared about what he wanted, worse luck. The local Jews, fools that they were, reckoned the British here as oppressive as the Nazis in Poland-or so they said, anyhow. Some of them had escaped from Poland after the Nazis conquered it, so they should have known better.

  “Turn,” the guard said: unnecessarily, for Moishe knew the way to the interrogation chamber as well as a rat knew how to run through a familiar maze. He never got rewarded with a piece of cheese for doing it right, though; maybe his handlers hadn’t heard of Pavlov.

  When he got to the right doorway, the guard stood back
and motioned for him to work the latch. That never failed to amuse him: his captors took him for a dangerous man who would seize a weapon and wreak havoc with it if he got the slightest chance. Ifonly it were so,he thought wryly. Give him a swatter and he might be dangerous to a fly. Past that… past that, the members of the underground were letting their imaginations run away with them.

  He opened the door, took one step into the room, and stopped in surprised dismay. There at the table, along with Begin and Stern and the other usual questioners, sat a Lizard. The alien swung an eye turret toward him. “This is the one? I have a hard time being sure,” he said in fair German.

  Moishe stared at him. The body paint he wore was far drabber than that which Moishe remembered, but no denying the voice was familiar “Zolraag!”

  “He knows me,” the former Lizard governor of Poland said. “Either you have coached him well or he is indeed the male who gave the Race such a difficult time in Poland.”

  “He’s Russie, all right,” Stern said. He was a big, dark fellow, a fighter rather than a thinker if looks mattered, which wasn’t always so. “He says we should steer clear of you, no matter what.” He spoke German, too, with a Polish accent.

  “And I say to you that we will give you quite a lot to have him in our claws again,” Zolraag answered. “He betrayed us-he betrayed me-and he should pay for this betrayal.” Lizards didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but Moishe didn’t like the way Zolraag looked or sounded. He hadn’t thought the Race worried about such things as revenge, either. If he was wrong there, he would have been happier not knowing it.

  “Nobody said anything about turning him over to you,” Menachem Begin said in Yiddish. “That was not why we brought you here.” He was short and slight, not a whole lot bigger than a Lizard himself. He was nothing much to look at, but when he spoke you had to take him seriously. He shook a finger at Zolraag. “We hear what you have to say, we hear what he has to say, and then we decide what to do.”

  “You would be well advised to take the Race and its desires more seriously,” Zolraag answered, his voice cold. As he had back in Poland, he assumed his concerns were more important than mankind’s simply because they were his. Had he been blond and blue-eyed instead of green-brown and scaly, he would have made a good SS man himself: the Race certainly had the notion of theHerrenvolk down solid.

  He did not succeed in impressing Begin. “You would be well advised to remember where you are,” the underground leader replied imperturbably. “We can always sell you to the British, and maybe get more from them for you than your people would give us for Russie here.”

  “I took this risk when I let you bring me up to this part of the continental mass,” Zolraag said; he had courage, whatever you thought of him and his kind. “I still have hopes, though, of persuading you that aligning with the Race, the inevitable victors in this conflict, will serve you best in the long run.”

  Moishe spoke for the first time: “What he really hopes is to get back his old rank. His body paint is very plain these days.”

  “Yes, and that is your fault,” Zolraag said with an angry hiss like that of a venomous serpent “It was through you that the province of Poland passed from being peaceful to becoming restive, and you turned on us and blamed us for policies of similar nature to those you had previously praised.”

  “Bombing Washington was not the same as bombing Berlin,” Moishe answered, picking up the old argument. “And now you cannot hold a rifle to my head to try to make me sing your praises and then use your machines to twist my words when I refuse. I was ready to die to tell the truth, and you would not let me. Of course I exposed you when I got the chance.”

  “Ready to die to tell the truth,” Zolraag echoed. He swung his eye turrets toward the Jews who might lead Palestine into rebellion for his people and against the British. “You are sensible, rational Tosevites, sirs. You must see the fanaticism, the futility of this attitude.”

  Moishe started to laugh. He didn’t intend to, but couldn’t help himself. The degree to which Zolraag misunderstood people in general and Jews in particular was breathtaking. The folk who had given the world Masada, who had stubbornly stayed Jews when slaughtered for sport or for refusing to convert to Christianity… and he expected them to choose the path of expedience? No, Russie couldn’t help but laugh.

  Then Menachem Begin laughed, too, and then Stern, and then all the underground leaders. Even the guard with the Sten gun, at first glance as humorless amamzer as was ever spawned, chuckled under his breath. The idea of Jews choosing rationality over martyrdom was too deliciously absurd to resist.

  Now the underground leaders glanced at one another. How could you explain Zolraag’s unintentional irony? Nobody tried. Maybe you couldn’t explain it, not so it made sense to him. Didn’t that show the essential difference between Lizards and human beings? Moishe thought so.

  Before he could drive the point home, Stern said, “We will not turn Russie over to you, Zolraag. Get used to that idea. We take care of our own.”

  “Very well,” the Lizard answered. “We also do this. Here I think your behavior may be more stubborn than necessary, but I comprehend it. Your mirth, however, I find beyond understanding.”

  “You would have to know more of our history for it to make sense to you,” Moishe told him.

  That set Zolraag to making unhappy-teakettle noises again. Russie hid a grin. He’d said that with malice aforethought The Lizards had a history that reached far back into the depths of time, to the days when men still lived in caves and fire was the great new invention of the age. As far as they were concerned, mankind had no history to speak of. The idea that they should concern themselves with human ephemera hit a nerve.

  Menachem Begin spoke to Zolraag: “Suppose we do rise against the British. Suppose you help us in the fight. Suppose that helps you come into Palestine afterwards. What do we get from it besides a new master to lord it over us in place of the master we have now?”

  “Are you now as free as any Tosevites on this planet?” Zolraag asked, adding an interrogative cough to the end of the sentence.

  “If we were, the British wouldn’t be our masters,” Stern answered.

  “Just so,” the Lizard said. “After the conquest of Tosev 3 is over, though, you will be raised to the same status as any other nation under us. You will have the highest degree of-what is the word? — autonomy, yes.”

  “Which is not much,” Moishe put in.

  “You be silent!” Zolraag said with an emphatic cough.

  “Why?” Russie jeered when none of the Jewish underground leaders chose to back the Lizard. “I’m just being truthful, which is sensible and rational, isn’t it? Besides, who knows if the conquest of Tosev 3 will ever be over? You haven’t beaten us yet, and we’ve hurt you badly.”

  “Truth,” Zolraag admitted, which disconcerted Moishe for a moment. The Lizard went on, “And among the Tosevite not-empires that has hurt us worst is Deutschland, which also hurt you Jews worst. Do you cheer on the Deutsche now where you fought them before?”

  Russie tried not to show his wince. Zolraag might have had no notion of what the history of the Jews was like, but he knew mentioning the Nazis to Jews was like waving a red flag before a bull: he did it to take away their power of rational thought. Reckoning him a fool did not do.

  “We are not talking about the Germans now,” Moishe said. “We’re talking about the British, who have treated Jews well on the whole, on the one hand, and your chances for conquering the world, which do not look as good as they might, on the other.”

  “Of course we shall conquer Tosev 3,” Zolraag said. “The Emperor has ordered it”-he looked down at the floor for a moment-“and it shall be done.”

  He didn’t sound particularly sensible or rational himself there. What he sounded like was an ultrapious Jew who got everything he knew from the Torah and the Talmud and rejected all secular learning: his faith sustained him in the face of all obstacles. Sometimes that kept
you going through bad times. Sometimes it blinded you to things you should see.

  Moishe studied his captors. Would they see Zolraag’s blind spot, or would their own blind them to it? He picked a different argument: “If you choose to deal with the Lizards, you’ll always be a little fish next to them. They may think you’re useful now, but what happens after they have Palestine and they don’t need you any more?”

  Menachem Begin showed his teeth in what was not a grin of amusement. “Then we start giving them a hard time, the same as we do the British now.”

  “This I believe,” Zolraag said. “It would certainly follow the Polish pattern.” Did he sound bitter? Hard to tell with a Lizard, but that would have been Moishe’s guess.

  “If the Race conquers the whole world, though, who will back you against us?” he asked Begin. “What can you hope to gain?”

  Now Begin started to laugh. “We are Jews. No one will back us. We will gain nothing. And we will fight anyway. Do you doubt it?”

  “Not even slightly,” Moishe said. For a moment, captive and captor understood each other perfectly. Moishe had been Zolraag’s captive, too. They had stared at each other across a gap of incomprehension wide as the black gulf of space that separated the Lizards’ world from Earth.

  Zolraag did not fully follow what was going on now, either. He said, “What is your answer, Tosevites? If you must. If there is fire for him in your innards because he is of your clutch of eggs, keep this Russie. But what do you say about the bigger question? Will you fight alongside us when we move forward here and punish the British?”

  “Do you Lizards decide things on the spur of the moment?” Stern demanded.

  “No, but we are not Tosevites, either,” Zolraag answered with evident relish. “You do everything quickly, do you not?”

  “Not everything,” Stern said, chuckling a little. “This we have to talk about. We’ll send you back safe-”

  “I was hoping to bring an answer with me,” Zolraag said. “This would not only help the Race but improve my own status.”