Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Captain Hanrahan nodded to Goddard, then pointed to the rocket revealed when the tarp came off. “Dere’s your baby, sir,” he said.

  Goddard smiled and shook his head. “Junior’s been adopted by the U.S. Army. I just come visit to make sure you boys know how to take care of him. I won’t have to do that much longer, either.”

  A smooth, silent hydraulic ram started raising the rocket from horizontal to vertical. It moved much more slowly than Sam would have liked. Every second they were out in the open meant one more second in which the Lizards could spot them from the air or from one of those instrument-laden artflicial moons they’d placed in orbit around the Earth. A fighter plane had shot up the woods a couple of launches ago, and scared him into the quivering fidgets: only fool luck the rockets hadn’t wrecked a lot of this scraped-together equipment.

  As soon as the rocket was standing straight up, two smaller trucks-tankers-rolled up to either side of it. “Douse your butts!” a sergeant in coveralls shouted, though nobody was smoking. A couple of soldiers carried hoses up the ladder that was part of the launch frame. Pumps started whirring. Liquid oxygen went into one tank, 200-proof alcohol into the other.

  “We’d get slightly longer range from wood alcohol, but good old ethanol is easier to cook up,” Goddard said.

  “Yes, sir,” Hanrahan said, nodding again. “This way, the whole crew gets a drink when we’re done, too. We’ll have earned it, by God.”Oined was what he really said. “And the Lizards over by Greenville, they get a hell of a surprise.”

  Ninety miles,Yeager thought,maybe a few more. Once it went off-if it didn’t do anything stupid like blowing up on the launcher-it would cross the Mississippi River and land in Mississippi in the space of a couple of minutes. He shook his head. If that wasn’t science fiction, what was it?

  “Fueled!” the driver of the launch truck sang out-he had the gauges that let him see how the rocket was doing. The soldiers disconnected the hoses, climbed down the ladder, and got the hell out of there. The two fuel tankers went back into the woods.

  The launcher had a rotating table at the base. It turned slightly, lining up the azimuth gyro with the planned course east to Greenville. The driver stuck his fist out the window and gave a thumbs-up: the rocket was ready to fly.

  Goddard turned to Captain Hanrahan. “There-you see? You didn’t need me here. I could have been back at Hot Springs, playing tiddlywinks with Sergeant Yeager.”

  “Yeah, when everything goes good, it goes great,” Hanrahan agreed. “But when it’s snafu, you like having the guy who dreamed up the gadget around, you know what I mean?”

  “Sooner or later, you’ll be doing it without me,” Goddard said, absently scratching at the side of his neck. Sam looked at him, wondering how he’d meant that. Probably both ways-he knew he was a sick man.

  Hanrahan took the statement at face value. “Whatever you say, Doc. Now whaddaya say we get the hell out of here?” Before Hanrahan could do that, he had to make a connection at the base of the rocket. Then, trailing a wire after him, he loped for the cover of the woods where the rest of the crew already waited. Goddard’s trot was slow but dogged. Sam stayed with him. When they were out of the clearing, Hanrahan gave Goddard the control box. “Here you go, sir. You wanna do the honors?”

  “I’ve done it before, thanks.” Goddard passed the box to Sam. “Sergeant, why don’t you take a turn?”

  “Me?” Sam said in surprise. But why not? You didn’t need to know atomic physics to figure out how the control box worked. It had one large red button, right in the middle. “Thank you, Dr. Goddard.” He pushed the button, hard.

  Flame spurted from the base of the rocket, blue for a moment then sun-yellow. The roar of the engine beat at Yeager’s ears. The rocket seemed to hang unmoving above the launcher for a moment. Sam nervously wondered if they were far enough away-when one of those babies blew, it blew spectacularly. But it didn’t blow. All at once, it wasn’t hanging any more, it was flying like an arrow, like a bullet, like nothing on God’s green earth. The roar sank down toward the merely unbearable.

  The blast shield at the base of the launcher kept the grass from catching fire. The driver sprinted out toward the cab of the truck. The launcher sank back toward the horizontal once more.

  “Now we get the hell outta here,” Hanrahan said. “Come on, I’ll take youse back to your horses.”

  He set a brisk pace. Yeager needed no urging to keep up. Neither did Goddard, though he was breathing harshly by the time they reached the soldier in charge of the animals. Yeager had just swung one foot into the stirrup when a flight of helicopters buzzed by overhead and started lashing the clearing from which the rocket had flown and the surrounding woods with gunfire and little rockets of their own.

  None of the ordnance came close to him. He grinned at Goddard and Captain Hanrahan as the helicopters headed east, back toward the Mississippi. “They don’t like us,” he said.

  “Hey, don’t blame me,” Hanrahan said. “You’re the guy shot that thing off.”

  “Yeah,” Yeager said, almost dreamily. “How about that?”

  “This is unacceptable,” Atvar declared. “That the Deutsch Tosevites fire missiles at us is one thing. That some other Big Uglies have now acquired the art presents us with severe difficulties.”

  “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “This one impacted uncomfortably close to the17th Emperor Satla, and would surely have destroyed it had the targeting been better.” He paused, then tried to look on the bright side: “Like the Deutsch rockets, it is very inaccurate-more an area weapon than a pinpoint one.”

  “If they fire enough of them, that ceases to matter,” Atvar snapped. “The Deutsche have killed a starship, though I don’t believe their intelligence realizes as much: if they knew such a thing, they would boast of it. But those losses we absolutely cannot afford.”

  “Nor can we hope to prevent them altogether,” Kirel said. “We have expended the last of our antimissile missiles, and close-in weapons systems offer only a limited chance of a target kill.”

  “I am all too painfully aware of these facts.” Atvar felt uncomfortable, unsafe, on the surface of Tosev 3. His eye turrets nervously swiveled this way and that. “I know we are a long distance from the nearest sea, but what if it occurs to the Big Uglies to mount their missiles on those ships they use to such annoying effect? We have not been able to sink all of them. For all we know, a missile-armed ship may be approaching Egypt while we are holding this conversation.”

  “Exalted Fleetlord, this is indeed possible, but strikes me as unlikely,” Kirel said. “We have enough genuine concerns to contemplate without inventing fresh ones.”

  “The Tosevites use missiles. The Tosevites use ships. The Tosevites are revoltingly ingenious. This does not strike me as an invented concern,” Atvar said, adding an emphatic cough. “This whole North African region is as salubrious to us as any on the planet. If all of Tosev 3 were like it, it would be a far more pleasant world. I do not want our settlements here to come into danger from Big Ugly waterborne assaults.”

  “No male would, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel drew back from the implied criticism he’d aimed at Atvar. “One way to improve our control over the area would be to annex the territory to the northeast of us, the region known as Palestine. I regret that Zolraag did not succeed in gaining the allegiance of the rebellious males there; they would reduce requirements for our own resources if they rose against the British.”

  “Truth,” Atvar said, “but only part truth. Tosevite allies have a way of becoming Tosevite enemies. Look at the Mexicanos. Look at the Italianos. Look at the Jews and Poland-and are these Big Uglies not Jews, too?”

  “They are, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel replied. “How these Jews pop up in such widely separated areas is beyond my understanding, but they do.”

  “They certainly do, and they cause trouble wherever they appear, too,” Atvar said. “Since the ones in Poland were so unreliable, I entertain no great hope tha
t we shall be able to count on the ones in Palestine, either. They would not turn Moishe Russie over to Zolraag, for instance, which makes me doubt their good faith, however much they try to ascribe their failure to group solidarity.”

  “We may yet be able to use them, though, even if we cannot trust them,” Kirel said, a sentiment the Race had employed with regard to a large variety of Big Uglies since coming to Tosev 3. The shiplord sighed. “A pity the Jews discovered the tracking device Zolraag planted in their conference chamber, or we could have swept down on the building that housed it and plucked Russie away from them.”

  “It is a pity, especially when the device was so small that their crude technology cannot come close to duplicating it,” Atvar agreed. “They must be as suspicious of us as we are of them.” His mouth dropped open in a wry chuckle. “They also have a nasty sense of humor.”

  “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “Finding that the tracker led directly to the largest British base in Palestine was-a disappointment.”

  Males of the Race had been saying that about a large variety of things since they came to Tosev 3, too.

  When Mordechai Anielewicz left Lodz, as had been true when he’d left Warsaw, he was reminded that the Jews, however numerous they were in Poland, remained a small minority of its population. Most of them had guns now, and they could call on their militias, which could bring heavier weapons to bear, but they were thin on the ground.

  That meant dealing with the Poles when he went out into the countryside, and dealing with the Poles made him nervous. A large majority of Poles had either done nothing or applauded when the Nazis shut the Jews away in big-city ghettos or massacred them in the towns and villages. A lot of those Poles hated the Lizards not for having driven out the Germans but for arming the Jews who’d helped them do it.

  And so, when a message came into Lodz that a Polish peasant urgently needed to speak to him, Mordechai wondered if he was walking into a trap. Then he wondered who might be setting the trap. If it was such. The Poles might want his scalp. So might the Lizards. So, for that matter, might the Germans. If they wanted to rid the Jews of a fighting leader. And the Jews who worried about the Nazis more than the Lizards might want revenge on him for shipping David Nussboym off to the Russians.

  Bertha Fleishman had spelled out all those possibilities in detail when the request for a meeting came in. “Don’t go,” she’d urged. “Think of all the things that can go wrong, and how few can go right.”

  He’d laughed. Back inside what had been the Jewish ghetto of Lodz, among his own people, laughter had come easily. “We didn’t get out from under the Nazis’ thumbs by being afraid to take chances,” he’d said. “What’s one more, among so many?” And so he’d prevailed, and so here he was, somewhere north of Lodz, not far from where Lizard control gave way to German.

  And so here he was, regretting he’d come. Now, when the only people in the fields were Polish, everyone sent a stranger suspicious looks. He himself didn’t look like a stereotypical Jew, but he’d seen on previous travels that he couldn’t readily pass for a Pole among Poles, either.

  “Fourth dirt road north of that miserable little town, go west, fifth farm on the left. Then ask for Tadeusz,” he muttered to himself. He hoped he’d counted the roads rightly. Was that little track supposed to be one, or not? He’d find out. His horse was ambling toward the fifth farmhouse on the left.

  A big burly blond man in overalls was forking beet tops into a manger for his cows. He didn’t bat an eyebrow as Mordechai, German rifle slung over his shoulder, rode up. A Mauser identical to Anielewicz’s leaned against the side of the barn. The fellow in overalls could grab it in a hurry if he had to. He stabbed the pitchfork into the ground and leaned on it. “You want something?” he asked, his deep voice wary but polite.

  “I’m looking for Tadeusz,” Anielewicz answered. “I’m supposed to tell him Lubomir says hello.”

  “Fuck hello,” the Pole-presumably Tadeusz-said with a big, booming laugh. “Where’s the five hundred zlotys he owes me?”

  Anielewicz swung down off his horse: that was the recognition signal he was supposed to get back. He stretched. His back creaked. He rubbed at it, saying, “I’m a little sore.”

  “I’m not surprised. You ride like a clodhopper,” Tadeusz said without rancor. “Listen, Jew, you must have all sorts of weird connections. Leastways, I never heard of any other clipcocks a German officer was trying to get hold of.”

  “A German officer?” For a moment, Mordechai simply stared. Then his wits started working again. “A panzer officer? A colonel?” He still didn’t trust the big Pole enough to name names.

  Tadeusz’s head bobbed up and down, which made his bushy golden beard alternately cover and reveal the topmost brass fastener on his overalls. “That’s the one,” he said. “From what I gather, he would have come looking for you himself, except that would have given him away.”

  “Given him away to whom? The Lizards?” Mordechai asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.

  Now Tadeusz’s head went from side to side, and so did the tip of his beard. “I don’t think so. Way I got the story, it’s some other stinking Nazi he’s worried about.” The Pole spat on the ground. “To hell with all of ’em, I say.”

  “To hell with all of ’em is easy to say, but we have to deal with some of them, though God knows I wish we didn’t,” Anielewicz said. Off to the north and east, artillery lire rumbled. Mordechai pointed in that direction. “You see? That’s the Germans, likely aiming at the railroad or the highway into Lodz. The Lizards have trouble getting supplies in there now, and a devil of a time fighting out of the place-not that we haven’t done our bit as far as that goes.”

  Tadeusz nodded. Shaded by a shapeless, almost colorless cloth cap, his eyes-a startlingly bright blue-were very keen. Mordechai wondered if he’d been a peasant before the war broke out, or perhaps something like an army major. Under the German occupation, Polish officers had had plenty of incentive to make themselves invisible.

  His suspicion gained intensity when Tadeusz said, “The Lizards won’t just be having trouble bringing in military supplies, either. Your people will be getting hungry by and by.”

  “That’s so,” Mordechai admitted. “Rumkowski’s noticed it-he’s hoarding everything he can for the bad times ahead. The bastard will lick the boots of anybody over him, but he can smell trouble, I give thealter kacker that much.”

  Tadeusz had no trouble understanding the couple of words of Yiddish in the middle of the Polish conversation. “Not the worst thing for a man to be able to do,” he remarked.

  “No,” Anielewicz said reluctantly. He tried to wrench matters back to those at hand. “Do you have any idea who this other Nazi is? If I knew that, I might have a better notion of why the panzer officer was trying to warn me. What do you know?”What will you tell me? If Tadeusz was a Polish officer lying low, he was liable to have the full measure of aristocratic contempt for Jews. If, on the other hand, he really was a peasant, he was even more liable to have a simple but even more vivid hatred running through his veins.

  And yet. If that were so, he wouldn’t have relayed Jager’s message in the first place. Mordechai couldn’t let his own ingrained distrust of the Poles get in the way of the facts. Now Tadeusz tugged at his beard before answering, “You have to remember, I got this fourth, maybe fifth-hand. I don’t know how much of it to trust myself.”

  “Yes, yes,” Anielewicz said impatiently. “Just tell me whatever you got, and I’ll try and put the pieces together. This German could hardly rig up a field telephone and call right into Lodz, now could he?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Tadeusz said, and Mordechai, remembering some of his own telephone calls out of the city, had to nod. The Pole went on, “All right, this is everything I got told: whatever’s going to happen-and I don’t know what that is-it’s going to happen in Lodz, and it’s going to happen to you Jews in Lodz. Word is, they’ve brought in some kind of an
SS man with a whole bunch of notches on his gun to do the job.”

  “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard of,” Mordechai said. “It’s not just that we’re not doing anything to the Nazis: we’re helping them, for God’s sake. The Lizards haven’t been able to do much of anything out of Lodz, and it isn’t because they haven’t tried.”

  Tadeusz looked at him with what he first took for scorn and then realized was pity. “I can give you two good reasons why the Nazis are doing what they’re doing. For one thing, you’re Jews, and then, for another thing, you’re Jews. You know about Treblinka, don’t you?” Without waiting for Anielewicz to nod, he finished, “They don’t care about what you do; they care about what you are.”

  “Well, I won’t say you’re wrong,” Anielewicz replied. He had a Polish Army canteen on his belt. He took it off, removed the stopper, and offered it to Tadeusz. “Here. Wash the taste of that out of your mouth.”

  The Pole’s larynx worked as he took several long, blissful swallows.Shikker iz ein goy, ran through Mordechai’s head: the gentile is a drunk. But Tadeusz stopped before the canteen was empty and handed it back to him. “If that’s not the worst applejack I’ve ever drunk, I don’t know what is.” He thumped his belly; the sound was like someone hitting a thick, hard plank. “Even the worst, though, is a damn sight better than none.”

  Mordechai swigged from the canteen. The raw spirit charred its way down his gullet and exploded like a 105mm shell in his stomach. “Yeah, you could strip paint with just the fumes from that, couldn’t you? But you’re not wrong-as long as it has the kick, that’s what you need.” He could feel his skin flush and his heart start racing. “So what am I supposed to do when this SS man shows up in Lodz? Shooting him on the spot doesn’t sound like the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”