Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Tadeusz’s eyes were slightly crossed. He’d taken a big dose on an empty stomach, and perhaps hadn’t realized how strong the stuff was till he’d got outside it. People who drank a lot were like that sometimes: they were used to strong, so they didn’t notice very strong till too late. The Pole’s eyebrows drew together as he tried to gather his wits. “What else did your Nazi chum say?” he wondered aloud.

  “He’s no chum of mine,” Anielewicz said indignantly. But maybe that wasn’t true. If Jager hadn’t thought something lay between them, he wouldn’t have sent a message, even a garbled one, into Lodz. Anielewicz had to respect that, whatever he thought of the uniform Jager wore. He took another cautious sip of applejack and waited to see if Tadeusz’s brains would start working again.

  After a while, they did. “Now I remember,” the Pole said, his face lighting up. “I don’t know how much to trust this, though-like I said, it came through a lot of mouths before it got to me.” What came through his mouth was a loud and unmistakable hiccup. “God and the Virgin and the saints only know if it came through the way it was supposed to.”

  “Nu?”Mordechai said, trying to get Tadeusz moving forward once more instead of sideways.

  “All right, all right.” The Pole made pushing motions, as if to fend off his impatience. “If it came to me straight, what he said was that, next time you saw him, you shouldn’t believe anything he told you, because he’d be lying through his teeth.”

  “He sent a message to tell me he’d be lying?” Anielewicz scratched his head. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Not my problem, God be praised,” Tadeusz answered. Mordechai glared at him, then turned, remounted his horse, and rode back toward Lodz without another word

  VIII

  Leslie Groves couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so far away from the Metallurgical Laboratory and its products. Now that he thought back on it, he hadn’t been away from the project since the day he’d taken that load of plutonium stolen first from the Lizards and then from the Germans off the HMSSeanymph. Ever since then, he’d lived, breathed, eaten, and slept atomic weapons.

  And now here he was well east of Denver, miles and miles away from worrying about things like graphite purity and neutron absorption cross sections (when he’d taken college physics, nobody had ever heard of neutrons), and making sure you didn’t vent radioactive steam into the atmosphere. If you did, and if the Lizards noticed, you’d surely never get a second chance-and the United States would almost certainly lose the war.

  But there were other ways to lose the war besides having a Lizard atomic bomb come down on his head. That was why he was out here: to help keep one of those other ways from happening. “Some vacation,” he muttered under his breath.

  “If you wanted a vacation, General, I hate to tell you, but you signed up with the wrong outfit,” Lieutenant General Omar Bradley said. The grin on his long, horsey face took any sting from his words; he knew Groves did a platoon’s worth of work all by his lonesome.

  “Yes, sir,” Groves answered. “What you’ve shown me impressed the living daylights out of me, I’ll tell you that. I just hope it looks as tough to the Lizards as it does to us.”

  “You and me and the whole United States,” Bradley answered. “If the Lizards punch through these works and take Denver, we’re all in a lot of trouble. If they get close enough to put your facility under artillery fire, we’re in a lot of trouble. Our job is to make sure they don’t, and to spend the fewest possible lives making sure of that. The people of Denver have seen enough.”

  “Yes, sir.” Groves said again. “Back in 1941, I saw newsreels of women and kids and old men marching out from Moscow with shovels on their shoulders to dig tank traps and trenches to hold off the Nazis. I never dreamt then that the same thing would happen here in the States one day.”

  “Neither did I. Neither did anybody,” Bradley said. He looked tough and worn, an impression strengthened by his Missouri twang and by the M-1 he carried in place of the usual officer’s sidearm. He’d been a crack shot ever since the days when he went hunting with his father, and didn’t let anyone forget it. Scuttlebutt had it that he’d used the M-l to good effect, too, in the first counterattack against the Lizards in late 1942.

  “We have more going for us than the Red Army did then,” Bradley said. “We weren’t just shoving dirt around.” He waved to show what he meant, continuing, “The Maginot Line isn’t a patch on these works. This is defense in depth, the way the Hindenburg Line was in the last war.” He paused again, this time to cough. “Not that I saw the Hindenburg Line, dammit, but I did study the reports on it most thoroughly.”

  “Yes, sir,” Groves said for the third time. He’d heard that Bradley was sensitive about not having gone Over There during World War I, and evidently the rumor machine had that one straight. He took a step up onto the parapet and looked around. “The Lizards’ll stub their snouts if they run up against this, no doubt about it.”

  Bradley’s voice went grim. “That’s not anif, worse luck; it’s awhen. We won’t stop ’em short of our works, not by the way they’ve broken out of Kansas and into Colorado. Lamar had to be evacuated the other day, you know.”

  “Yes, I’d heard that,” Groves said. It had sent cold chills down his spine, too. “Looking at all this, though, I feel better than I did when the word came down.”

  What man could do to turn gently rising prairie into real defensive terrain, man had done. Trenches and deep, broad antitank ditches ringed Denver to the east for miles around. Great belts of barbed wire would impede Lizard infantry. If not armor. Concrete pillboxes had been placed wherever the ground was suitable. Some of them held machine guns; others provided aiming points for bazooka men.

  Along with the antitank ditches, tall concrete teeth and stout steel posts were intended to channel Lizard armor toward the men with the rockets that could destroy it. If a tank tried to go over those obstacles instead of around them, it would present its weaker belly armor to the antitank guns waiting for just that eventuality. Stretches of the prairie looked utterly innocent but were in fact sown with mines enough to make the Lizards pay a heavy price for crossing them.

  “It all looks grand, that it does,” Bradley said. “I worry about three things, though. Do we have enough men to put into the works to make them as effective as they ought to be? Do we have enough munitions to make the Lizards say uncle if they strike us with everything they’ve got? And do we have enough food to keep our troops in the works day after day, week after week? The best answer I can up with for any of those isI hope so.”

  “Considering that any or all of them might beno, that’s a damn sight better than it might be,” Groves said.

  “So it is, but it’s not good enough.” Bradley scratched his chin, then turned to Groves. “Your facilities have taken proper precautions?”

  “Yes, sir,” Groves answered. He was pretty sure Bradley already knew that, but even three-star generals sometimes needed reassuring. “As soon as the bombing in and around Denver picked up, we implemented our deception plan. We lit bonfires by our most important buildings, and under cover of the smoke we put up the painted canvas sheets that make them look like ruins from the air. We haven’t had any strikes close by since, so for now it looks like the plan has paid off.”

  “Good,” Bradley said. “It had better pay off. Your facility is why we’ll fight to the last man to hold Denver, and you know it as well as I do. Oh, we’d fight for it anyway-God knows we don’t want the Lizards stretching their hold all the way across the Great Plains-but with the Met Lab here, it’s not a town we want to have, it’s a town we have to have.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand that,” Groves said. “The physicists tell me we’ll have another little toy ready inside of a couple of weeks. We’ll want to hold the Lizards away from Denver without using it, I know, but if it comes down to using it or losing the town-”

  “I was hoping you would tell me something like that, General,” Bradley
answered. “As you say, we’ll do everything we can to hold Denver without resorting to nuclear weapons, because the Lizards do retaliate against our civilian population. But if it comes down to a choice between losing Denver and taking every step we can to keep it, I know what the choice will be.”

  “I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Groves said. Bradley nodded.

  Lizard planes screamed by. Antiaircraft guns hammered at them. Every once in a while, the guns brought down a fighter-bomber, too, but seldom enough that it wasn’t much more than dumb luck. Bombs hit the American works; the blasts boxed Groves’ ears.

  “Whatever that was they hit, it’ll take a lot of pick-and-shovel work to set it right again.” Omar Bradley looked unhappy. “Hardly seems fair to the poor devils who have to do all the hard work to see the fruits of their labors go up in smoke that way.”

  “Destroying is easier than building, sir,” Groves answered.That’s why it’s easier to turn out a soldier than an engineer, he thought. He didn’t say that out loud. Giving the people who worked for you the rough side of your tongue could sometimes spur them on to greater effort. If you got your superior angry at you, though, he was liable to let you down when you needed him most.

  Groves pursed his lips and nodded thoughtfully. In its own way, that was engineering, too.

  Ludmila Gorbunova let her hand rest on the butt of her Tokarev automatic pistol. “You are not using me in the proper fashion,” she told the leader of the guerrilla band, a tough, skinny Pole who went by the name of Casimir. To make sure he couldn’t misunderstand it, she said it first in Russian, then in German, and then in what she thought was Polish.

  He leered at her. “Of course I’m not,” he said. “You still have your clothes on.”

  She yanked the pistol out of its holster: “Pig!” she shouted. “Idiot! Take your brain out of your pants and listen to me!” She clapped a hand to her forehead.“Bozhemoi! If the Lizards paraded a naked whore around Hrubieszow, they’d lure you and every one of your skirt-chasing cockhounds out of the forest to be slaughtered.”

  Instead of blowing up at her, he said, “You are very beautiful when you are angry,” a line he must have stolen from a badly dubbed American film.

  She almost shot him on the spot.This was what she’d got for doing thatkulturny General von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt a favor, a trip to a band of partisans who didn’t have the wits to clear all the trees out of their landing strip and who hadn’t the first clue how to employ the personnel who, for reasons often inscrutable to her, nonetheless adhered to their cause.

  “Comrade,” she said, keeping things as simple as she could, “I am a pilot. I have no working aircraft here.” She didn’t bother pointing out-what was the use? — that the partisans hadn’t come up with a mechanic able to fix her poorKukuruznik, which was to her the equivalent of failing kindergarten. “Using me as a soldier gives me less to do than I might otherwise. Do you know of any other aircraft I might fly?”

  Casimir reached up under his shirt and scratched his belly. He was hairy as a monkey-and not much smarter than one, either,Ludmila thought. She expected he wouldn’t answer her, and regretted losing her temper-regretted it a little, anyway, as she would have regretted any piece of tactics that could have been better. At last, though, he did reply: “I know of a band that either has or knows about or can get its hands on some sort of a German plane. If we get you to it, can you fly it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “If it flies, I can probably fly it. You don’t sound like you know much.” After a moment, she added, “About this airplane, I mean. What kind is it? Where is it? Is it in working order?”

  “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it is. Where? That I know. It is a long way from here, north and west of Warsaw, not far from where the Nazis are operating again these days. If you want to travel to it, this can probably be arranged.”

  She wondered if there was any such plane, or if Casimir merely wanted to be rid of her. He was trying to send her farther away from therodina, too. Did he want her gone because she was a Russian? There were a few Russians in his band, but they didn’t strike her as ideal specimens of Soviet manhood. Still. If the plane was where he said it was, she might accomplish something useful with it. She was long since convinced she couldn’t do that here.

  “Khorosho,”she said briskly: “Good. What sort of guides and passwords will I need to get to this mysterious aircraft?”

  “I will need some time to make arrangements,” Casimir said. “They might go faster if you-” He stopped; Ludmila had swung up the pistol to point at his head. He did have nerve. His voice didn’t waver as he admitted, “On the other hand, they might not.”

  “Khorosho,”Ludmila said again, and lowered the gun. She hadn’t taken off the safety, but Casimir didn’t need to know that. She wasn’t even very angry at him. He might not bekulturny, but he did understandno when he stared down a gun barrel. Some men-Georg Schultz immediately sprang to mind-needed much stronger hints than that.

  Maybe having a pistol pointed at his face convinced Casimir that he really did want to be rid of Ludmila. Two days later, she and a pair of guides-a Jew named Avram and a Pole called Wladeslaw-headed north and west in a beat-up wagon pulled by a beat-up donkey. Ludmila had wondered if she ought to get rid of her Red Air Force gear, but seeing what the Pole and the Jew wore put an end to that notion. Wladeslaw might have been a Red Army man himself, though he carried a GermanGewehr 98 on his back. And Avram’s hooked nose and stringy, graying beard looked particularly out of place under the brim of a coal-scuttle helmet someWehrmacht man would never need again.

  As the wagon rattled on through the modest highlands south of Lublin, she saw how common such mixtures of clothing were, not just among partisans but for ordinary citizens-assuming any such still existed in Poland. And every other man and about every third woman carried a rifle or submachine gun. With only the Tokarev on her hip, Ludmila began to feel underdressed.

  She also got a closer look at the Lizards than she’d ever had before: now a convoy of lorries rolling past and kicking up clouds of dust, now tanks tearing up the roads even worse. Had those tanks been in the Soviet Union, their machine guns would have made short work of a wagon and three armed people in it, but they rumbled by, eerily quiet, without even pausing.

  In pretty good Russian-he and Wladeslaw both spoke the language-Avram said, “They don’t know whether we’re with them or against them. They’ve learned not to take chances finding out, too. Every time they make a mistake and shoot up people who had been their friends, they turn a lot of people who were for them against them.”

  “Why are there so many willing traitors to mankind in Poland?” Ludmila asked. The phrase from Radio Moscow sprang automatically to her lips; only after she’d said it did she wish she’d been more tactful.

  Fortunately, it didn’t irk either Wladeslaw or Avram. In fact, they both started to laugh. They both started to answer at the same time, too. With a flowery wave, Avram motioned for Wladeslaw to go on. The Pole said, “After you’ve lived under the Nazis for a while and under the Reds for a while, anything that isn’t the Nazis or the Reds looks good to a lot of folks.”

  Now they’d gone and insulted her, or at least her government. She said, “But I remember Comrade Stalin’s statement on the wireless. The only reason the Soviet Union occupied the eastern half of Poland was that the Polish state was internally bankrupt, the government had disintegrated, and the Ukrainians and Belorussians in Poland, cousins to their Soviet kindred, were left to the mercy of fate. The Soviet Union extricated the Polish people from war and enabled them to lead a peaceful life until fascist aggression took its toll on us all.”

  “That’s what the wireless said, is it?” Avram said. Ludmila stuck out her chin and nodded stubbornly. She was primed and ready for a fine, bruising ideological debate, but Avram and Wladeslaw didn’t feel like arguing. Instead, they howled laughter like a couple of wit-struck wolves baying at the moon. They pounded their fists dow
n on their thighs and finally ended up embracing each other. The donkey flicked its ears in annoyance at their untoward carrying-on.

  “What have I said that was so funny?” Ludmila inquired in tones of ice.

  Avram didn’t answer directly. Instead, he returned a question of his own: “Could I teach you Talmud in a few minutes?” She didn’t know what Talmud was, but shook her head. He said, “That’s right. To learn Talmud, you’d have to learn a whole new way of looking at the world and think only in that way-a new ideology. If you want to put it that way.” He paused again. This time she nodded. He went on, “You already have an ideology, but you’re so used to it, you don’t even notice it’s there. That’s what’s funny.”

  “But my ideology is scientflic and correct,” Ludmila said. For some reason, that started the Jew and the Pole on another spasm of laughter. Ludmila gave up. With some people, you simply could not have an intelligent discussion.

  The land dropped down toward the valley of the Vistula. Kaziemierz Doly looked down on the river from high, sandy banks overgrown with willows whose branches trailed in the water and cut by a good many ravines. “Lovers come here in the springtime,” Wladeslaw remarked. Ludmila sent him a suspicious look, but he let it go at that, so it probably hadn’t been a suggestion.

  Some of the buildings around the marketplace were large and had probably been impressive when they were whole, but several rounds of fighting had left most of them charred ruins. A synagogue didn’t look much better than any of the other wreckage, but Jews were going in and out. Other Jews-armed guards-stood watch outside.

  Ludmila caught Avram glancing over at Wladeslaw to see if he would say anything about that. He didn’t. Ludmila couldn’t tell whether that pleased the Jewish partisan or irked him. What passed for Polish politics was too complex for her to follow easily.

  A ferryboat sent up a great cloud of soft-coal fumes as it carried the wagon across the Vistula. The country was so flat, it reminded Ludmila of the endless plain surrounding Kiev. Cottages with thatched roofs and with sunflowers and hollyhocks growing around them could have belonged to her homeland, too.