Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  He waved. His support squad vanished among the trees. If anything went wrong at the meeting, the Germans would pay. A couple of years before, Jewish fighters wouldn’t have been so smooth about moving in the woods. They’d had practice since.

  Anielewicz walked up the trail toward the clearing where he was supposed to confer with the Nazis and see what Heinrich Jager had up his sleeve-or what he said he had up his sleeve. Since that talk with the Pole who called himself Tadeusz, Anielewicz was leery about believing anything the German might tell him. On the other hand, he would have been leery about believing Jager without talking to Tadeusz, too.

  As he’d been instructed, he paused before entering the clearing and whistled the first few bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. He found that a curious choice for the Germans, since those bars made a Morse V-for-victory, the symbol of the anti-Nazi underground before the Lizards came. But, when somebody whistled back, he advanced up the forest track and out into the open space.

  There stood Jager, and beside him a tail, broad-shouldered man with a scar on his face and a glint in his eye. The scar made the big man’s expression hard to read: Mordechai couldn’t tell if that was a friendly grin or a nasty one. The German had on a private’s tunic, but if he was a private, Anielewicz was a priest.

  Jager said, “Good day,” and offered his hand. Mordechai took it: Jager had always dealt fairly with him. The German panzer colonel said, “Anielewicz, here is Colonel Otto Skorzeny, who’s given the Lizards more trouble than any ten men you could name.”

  Mordechai kicked himself for not recognizing Skorzeny. The German propaganda machine had pumped out plenty of material about him. If he’d done a quarter of what Gobbels claimed, he was indeed a hero on the hoof. Now he stuck out his hand and boomed, “Good to meet you, Anielewicz. From what Jager says, you two are old friends.”

  “We know each other, yes,Standartenfuhrer.” Mordechai shook hands, but deliberately used Skorzeny’s SS rank rather than theWehrmacht equivalent Jager had given.I know what you are.

  So what?Skorzeny’s eyes answered insolently. He said, “Isn’t that sweet? How do you feel about giving the Lizards a boot in the balls they haven’t got?”

  “Them or you, it doesn’t much matter to me.” Anielewicz kept his voice light, casual. Skorzeny impressed him more than he’d expected. The man didn’t seem to give a damn whether he lived or died. Mordechai had seen that before, but never coupled with so much relentless energy. If Skorzeny died, he’d make sure he had a lot of choice company.

  He studied Anielewicz, too, doing his best to intimidate him with his presence. Mordechai stared back. If the SS man, wanted to try something, he’d be sorry. He didn’t try. He laughed instead. “All right, Jew, let’s do business. I’ve got a little toy for the Lizards, and I could use some help getting it right into the middle of Lodz where it’ll do the most good.”

  “Sounds interesting,” Mordechai said. “So what is this toy? Tell me about it.”

  Skorzeny set a finger by the side of his nose and winked. “It’s the biggest goddamn ginger bomb you ever did see, that’s what. Not just the powdered stuff, mind you, but an aerosol that’ll get all over everything in a huge area and keep the Lizards too drugged up to get into it for a long time.” He leaned forward a little and lowered his voice. “We’ve tested it on Lizard prisoners, and it’s the straight goods. It’ll drive ’em out of their skulls.”

  “I bet it will,” Anielewicz answered.Sure it will. If he’s telling the truth. Is he? If you were a mouse, would you let a cat carry cheese down into your hole? But if Skorzeny was lying, he didn’t show it at all. And if, by some odd chance, he was telling the truth, the ginger bomb would wreak all the havoc he said it would. Mordechai could easily imagine the Lizards battling one another in the streets because they were too full of ginger to think straight, or even to do much thinking at all.

  He wanted to believe Skorzeny. Without Jager’s obscure warning, he thought he would have believed Skorzeny. Something about the SS man made you want to go in the direction he was pushing. Anielewicz had enough of that gift himself to recognize it in others-and Skorzeny had a big dose.

  Anielewicz decided to prod a little, to see what lay behind the bluff, hearty facade. “Why the devil should I trust you?” he demanded. “When has the SS ever meant anything but trouble for Jews?”

  “The SS means trouble for all enemies of theReich.” Pride rang in Skorzeny’ s voice. In his own way, he was-or seemed-honest. Anielewicz didn’t know whether he preferred that or the hypocrisy he’d been expecting. Skorzeny went on, “Who now is the most dangerous enemy of theReich? You kikes?” He shook his head. “Of course not. The Lizards are the most dangerous. We worry about them first and the rest of the shit later.”

  Before the Lizards came, the Soviet Union had been the most dangerous enemy of theReich. That hadn’t stopped the Nazis from building extermination camps in Poland, diverting resources they could have used to fight the Bolsheviks. Anielewicz said, “All right, suppose you drive the Lizards away from Lodz and Warsaw. What happens to us Jews then?”

  Skorzeny spread his big hands and shrugged. “I don’t make policy. I just kill people.” Amazing that his grin could be disarming after he said something like that, but it was. “You don’t want to be around us, though, and we don’t want you around, so maybe we could ship you somewhere. Who knows? To Madagascar, maybe; they were talking about that before the Lizards came, but we didn’t exactly own the seas.” Now that twisted grin was wry. “Or maybe even to Palestine. Like I say, who the hell knows?”

  He was glib. He was convincing. He was all the more frightening on account of that. “Why use this thing in Lodz?” Mordechai asked. “Why not at the front?”

  “Two reasons,” Skorzeny answered. “First, you get a lot more enemies in one place at concentration areas in the rear. And second, a lot of Lizards at the front have some protection against gas warfare, and that keeps the ginger out, too.” He chuckled. “Ginger is gas warfare-happy gas, but gas.”

  Anielewicz turned to Heinrich Jager. “What do you think of this? Will it work? If it was up to you, would you do it?”

  Jager’s face didn’t show much, but Jager’s face, from what Mordechai had seen, seldom showed much. He half regretted his words; he was putting on the spot the nearest thing he had to a friend and ally in theWehrmacht. Jager coughed, then said, “I’ve been on more missions with Colonel Skorzeny than I care to remember.” Skorzeny laughed out loud at that. Ignoring him, Jager went on, “I’ve never seen him fail when he sets himself a goal. If he says this will do the job, you’d better listen to him.”

  “Oh, I’m listening,” Anielewicz said. He gave his attention back to Otto Skorzeny. “Well,Herr Standartenfuhrer, what will you do if I tell you we don’t want anything to do with this? Will you try to get it into Lodz anyhow?”

  “Aber naturlich.”Skorzeny’s Austrian accent made him sound like an aristocrat fromfin de siecle Vienna rather than a Nazi thug. “We don’t give up easily. We’ll do this with you or without you. It would be easier with you, maybe, and you Jews can put yourselves in our good graces by going along. Since we’re going to win the war and rule Poland, doesn’t that strike you as a good idea?”

  Come on. Collaborate with us.Skorzeny wasn’t subtle. Mordechai wondered if he had it in him to be subtle. He sighed. “Since you put it that way-”

  Skorzeny slapped him on the back, hard enough to make him stagger. “Ha! I knew you were a smart Jew. I-”

  Noise from the woods made him break off. Anielewicz quickly figured out what it was. “So you brought some friends along to the meeting, too? They must have bumped up against mine.”

  “I said you were a smart Jew, didn’t I?” Skorzeny answered. “How soon can we get this moving? I don’t like waiting around with my thumb up my arse.”

  “Let me get back to Lodz and make the arrangements to bring in your little package,” Mordechai said. “I know how to get in touch with Colonel Jager here, and he probabl
y knows how to get in touch with you.”

  “Yes, probably.” Jager’s voice was dry.

  “Good enough,” Skorzeny said. “Just don’t take too damn long, that’s all I have to tell you. Remember, with you or without you, this is going to happen. Those Lizards will be sorry about the day they crawled out of their eggs.”

  “You’ll hear from me soon,” Mordechai promised. He didn’t want Skorzeny doing whatever he had in mind all by himself. The SS man was altogether too likely to succeed at it, whatever it was. It might make the Lizards sorry, but Anielewicz wouldn’t have bet the Jews would care for it, either.

  He whistled loudly, a cue for his men to head toward Lodz, then nodded to Jager and Skorzeny and left the clearing. He was very thoughtful all the way back down there.

  “How far do we trust the Germans?” he asked back at the fire station on Lutomierska Street. “How farcan we trust the Germans, especially when one of them has told us not to?”

  “Timeo Danaos et donas ferentes,”Bertha Fleishman said. Mordechai nodded; he’d had a secular education, with Latin a good part of it. For those who didn’t know their Virgil, Bertha translated: “I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.”

  “That’s it exactly,” Solomon Gruver said. The fireman was a battered, blunt-faced fellow who looked like a prizefighter and had been a sergeant in the Polish Army in 1939. He’d managed to conceal that from the Nazis, who probably would have liquidated him for it. It made him enormously useful to the Jewish underground: unlike most of its members, he hadn’t had to learn matters military from scratch. He tugged at his bushy, gray-streaked beard. “Sometimes I think Nussboym had the right idea after all: better to live under the Lizards than with these Nazimamzrim cracking the whip.”

  “Either way, we get the short end of the stick,” Mordechai said. Heads bobbed up and down along the length of the table. “With the Nazis, it’s just us who get the short end, but it’s bloody short. With the Lizards, everybody gets it, but maybe not so bad as the Germans give it to us.” He chuckled ruefully. “Some bargain, isn’t it?”

  “So what do we do?” Gruver demanded. This wasn’t a military matter, or not strictly so. He let others lead-sometimes made others lead-in policy decisions, then weighed in with his own opinion, but was oddly shy about taking the lead himself.

  Everybody looked at Anielewicz. Partly that was because he’d met the Germans, partly because people were used to looking at him. He said, “I don’t think we have any choice but to take the thing from Skorzeny. That way, we have some control over it, no matter what it ends up being.”

  “The Trojan Horse,” Bertha Fleishman suggested.

  Mordechai nodded. “That’s right. That’s just what it’s liable to be. But Skorzeny said he’d do it with us or without us. I believe him. We’d be making a big mistake if we ever took that man less than seriously. We’ll take it now, we’ll do our best to find out what it is, and go from there. Otherwise, he’d find some other way to sneak it into Lodz without our knowing-”

  “You really think he could do that?” Gruver asked.

  “I have talked with this man. I would not put anything past him,” Mordechai answered. “The only way we have a chance of getting away with this is pretending we’re a pack ofschlemiels who believe everything he says. Maybe then he’ll trust us to do his dirty work for him and not look inside the Trojan Horse.”

  “And if it is the world’s biggest ginger bomb, as he says?” somebody asked.

  “Then we have a lot of Lizards getting into a king-sized brawl, right in the middle of Lodz,” Mordechai said.“Alevai omayn, that’s all we have.”

  “T-T-T-oma,” the Tosevite hatchling said triumphantly, and looked right at Ttomalss. Its mobile face twisted into an expression that indicated pleasure.

  “Yes, I am Ttomalss,” the psychologist agreed. The hatchling had no control over its excretions, but it was learning to talk. The Big Uglies were a peculiar species indeed, as far as Ttomalss was concerned.

  “T-T-T-oma,” the hatchling repeated, and added an emphatic cough for good measure. Ttomalss wondered whether it really was putting stress on his name or just reproducing another word-like sound it knew.

  “Yes, I am Ttomalss,” he said again. If Big Uglies acquired language in a way at all similar to that which hatchlings of the Race used, hearing things over and over would help it learn. It was already showing itself to be a good deal more precocious than hatchlings of the Race as far as talking went: however it learned words, it learned them rapidly. But its coordination, or rather lack of same, set it apart from hatchlings still wet with the juices of their eggs.

  He started to repeat his name once more, but the communicator squawked for attention. He went over to it and saw Ppevel staring out of the screen. “Superior sir,” he said as he turned on the video so Ppevel could see him in turn. “How may I serve you, superior sir?”

  The assistant administrator for the eastern section of the main continental mass wasted no time with polite small talk. He said, “Prepare the hatchling that came from the body of the Tosevite called Liu Han for immediate return to the surface of Tosev 3.”

  Ttomalss had known for some time that that blow might come. He still could not prevent a hiss of pain. “Superior sir, I must appeal,” he said. “The hatchling is at the point of beginning to acquire language. To abandon the project involving it would be to cast aside knowledge that can be obtained in no other way, violating principles of scientflic investigation the Race has traditionally employed regardless of circumstances.” He knew no stronger argument than that.

  “Tradition and Tosev 3 increasingly prove immiscible,” Ppevel replied. “I repeat: prepare the hatchling for immediate return to Tosev 3.”

  “Superior sir, it shall be done,” Ttomalss said miserably. Obedience was a principle the Race had traditionally followed, too. Even so, he went on, “I do protest your decision, and request”-he couldn’t demand, not when Ppevel outranked him-“that you tell me why you made it.”

  “I will give you my reasons-or rather, my reason,” the assistant administrator answered. “It is very simple: the People’s Liberation Army is making life in China unbearable for the Race. Their most recent outrage, which took place just the other day, involved the detonation of several large-caliber artillery shells, and produced losses larger than we can afford to absorb. The males of the People’s Liberation Army-and the one angry female whose hatchling you now have-have pledged to diminish such activities in exchange for the return of this hatchling. The bargain strikes me as being worth making.”

  “The female Liu Han is still high in the councils of this bandit grouping?” Ttomalss said glumly. He had been so certain his plan to disgrace the female would succeed. It had fit perfectly with what he thought he knew of Big Ugly psychology.

  But Ppevel said, “Yes, she is, and still insistent on the return of the hatchling. It has become a political liability to us. Returning it to the Tosevite female Liu Han may transform that liability into a propaganda victory, and will have the effect of reducing military pressure on our forces in Peking. Therefore, for the third time, ready the hatchling for immediate return to Tosev 3.”

  “It shall be done,” Ttomalss said sadly. Ppevel didn’t hear that: he’d already broken the connection, no doubt so he wouldn’t have to listen to any further objections from Ttomalss. That was rude. Ttomalss, unfortunately for him, was in no position to do anything about it except resent it.

  He had to assume that when Ppevel saidimmediate, he meant it. He made sure the Tosevite hatchling had dry wrappings for its excretory orflices, and made sure those wrappings were snug around the hatchling’s legs and midsection. The trip down would be in free fall; the last thing he wanted was bodily waste floating around in the shuttlecraft. The pilot wouldn’t be delighted if that happened, either.

  He wished he could do something about the hatchling’s mouth. Big Uglies in free fall had been known to suffer reverse peristalsis, as if they were expelling poisonous materi
al they had swallowed. The Race did not suffer similar symptoms. Ttomalss packed several clean waste cloths, just in case he’d need them.

  While he worked, the hatchling cheerfully babbled on. The sounds it made these days were as close to the ones the Race used as it could come with its somewhat different vocal apparatus. Ttomalss let out another hissing sigh. He would have to start over with a new hatchling, and it would be years before he could learn all he wanted about Tosevite language acquisition.

  Tessrek stopped in the doorway. He didn’t undo the gate Ttomalss had rigged to keep the hatchling from wandering the corridor, but jeered over it. “You’ll finally be getting rid of that horrible thing, I hear. I won’t be sorry to see-and scent-the last of it, let me tell you.”

  Ppevel wouldn’t have called Tessrek directly. He might well have called the male who supervised both Tessrek and Ttomalss, though, to make sure his orders were obeyed. That would have been all he needed to get rumors flying. Ttomalss said, “Go tend to your own research, and may it be treated as cavalierly as mine has.”

  Tessrek let his mouth fall open in a derisive laugh. “My research, unlike yours, is productive, so I have no fear of its being curtailed.” He did leave then, and just as well, or Ttomalss might have thrown something at him.

  Only a little later, a male in the red and silver body paint of a shuttlecraft pilot gave the gateway a dubious look with one eye turret. He speared Ttomalss with the other, saying, “Is the Big Ugly ready to travel, Researcher?” His tone warned,It had better be.

  “It is,” Ttomalss said grudgingly. He examined the other male’s body paint again and added, even more grudgingly, “Superior sir.”

  “Good,” the shuttlecraft pilot said. “I am Heddosh, by the way.” He gave Ttomalss his name as if convinced the researcher should already have known it.

  Ttomalss scooped up the Tosevite hatchling. That wasn’t as easy as it had been when the creature was newly emerged from the body of the female Liu Han: it was much bigger now, and weighed much more. Ttomalss had to put down the bag of supplies he had with him so he could open the gate, at which point the hatchling nearly wriggled out of his arms. Heddosh emitted a derisive snort. Ttomalss glared at him. He had no idea of the difficulties involved in keeping this hatchling of another species alive and healthy.