Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  XII

  As prisons went, the one Moishe Russie and his wife and son now inhabited wasn’t bad. It even outdid the villa where the Jewish underground in Palestine had incarcerated them. Here, in what had been a fine hotel, he and his family got plenty of food and enjoyed both electricity and hot and cold running water. If not for bars on the windows and armed Lizard guards outside the door, the suite would have been luxurious.

  Despite bars, the windows drew Moishe. He stared in endless fascination out across Cairo at the Nile and, beyond it, the Pyramids. “I never thought we would be like Joseph and come to Egypt out of Palestine,” he said.

  “Who will be our Moses and lead us out again?” Reuven asked.

  Moishe felt a burst of pride: the boy was still so young, but already not just learning the great stories of the Torah but applying them to his own life. He wished he had a better answer to give his son than “I don’t know,” but he didn’t want to lie to Reuven, either.

  Rivka had a question much more to the point: “What will they do to us now?”

  “I don’t know that, either,” Moishe said. He wished Rivka and Reuven hadn’t come with him after Zolraag recognized him in the Jerusalem prison camp. Far too late now to do anything but wish, though. But he was vulnerable through them. Even back in Warsaw, the Lizards had threatened them to try to make him do what they wanted. His family’s convenient disappearance had scotched that there. It wouldn’t here. He’d been ready to let himself be killed rather than obey the Lizards. But letting his wife and son suffer-that was something else again.

  A key turned in the lock, out in the hall. Moishe’s heart beat faster. It was halfway between breakfast and lunchtime, not a usual hour for the Lizards to bother him. The door opened. Zolraag came in. The former provincelord of Poland was wearing more ornate body paint now than either of the times when Moishe had seen him in Palestine. He hadn’t returned to the almost rococo splendor of his ornamentation back in his Warsaw days, but he was gaining on it.

  He stuck out his tongue in Moishe’s direction, then reeled it back in. “You will come with me immediately,” he said in fair German, turningsofort into a long, menacing hiss.

  “It shall be done,” Moishe answered in the language of the Race. He hugged Rivka and kissed Reuven on the forehead, not knowing whether he would see them again. Zolraag allowed that, but made small, impatient noises, like a thick pot of stew coming to a boil.

  When Moishe came over to him, the Lizard rapped on the inner surface of the door: the knob there had been removed. Zolraag used a sequence of knocks different from any the Lizards had employed before, presumably to keep the Russies from learning a code, breaking out, and causing trouble. Not for the first time, Moishe wished he and his family were as dangerous as the Lizards believed they were.

  Out in the hallway, four males pointed automatic weapons at his midsection. Zolraag gestured for him to walk toward the stairwell. Two of the Lizard guards followed, both of them too far back to let him whirl and try to seize their rifles-as if he would have beenmeshuggeh enough to try.

  Zolraag ordered him into a mechanical combat vehicle. The guards got into it, too. One of them slammed the rear doors shut behind him. The clang of metal striking metal had a dreadfully final sound.

  Zolraag spoke a single word into what looked like a microphone at the front of the troop compartment: “Go.”

  The combat vehicle clattered through the streets. Moishe got only a limited view through the machine’s firing ports. It was one of the least pleasurable journeys of his life in any number of ways. The seat on which he awkwardly tried to perch was made for a male of the Race, not someone his size; his backside didn’t fit it, while his knees came up under his chin. It was hot in there, too, hotter even than outside. The Lizards basked in the heat. Russie wondered if he’d pass out before they got where they were going.

  He glimpsed a marketplace that dwarfed any he’d seen in Palestine. Through the fighting vehicle’s armor plate, he heard people jeering and cursing at the Lizards-that, at least, is what he thought they were doing, though he knew not a word of Arabic. But if anything so gutturally incandescent wasn’t cursing, it should have been. Whatever it was, Zolraag ignored it.

  A few minutes later, the vehicle stopped. One of Moishe’s guards opened the doors at the rear.“Jude heraus,” Zolraag said, which made the hair stand up on the back of Russie’s neck.

  They’d brought him to another hotel. The Lizards had fortified this one like the Maginot Line; when Moishe looked around, he saw enough razor wire, aliens with automatic weapons, and panzers and combat vehicles to hold off Rommel’sAfrika Korps and the British who’d fought him… not that the Nazis or the British were going concerns in North Africa these days.

  He didn’t get much time for sightseeing. Zolraag said, “Come,” the guards pointed their weapons at him, and he perforce came. The hotel lobby had ceiling fans. They weren’t turning. The electric lights were on, so Moishe decided the fans were off because the Lizards wanted them off.

  The lift worked, too. In fact, it purred upward more silently and smoothly than any on which Moishe had ever ridden. He didn’t know whether it had always been like that or the Lizards had improved it after they conquered Cairo. It was, at the moment, the least of his worries.

  When the lift doors opened, he found himself on the sixth floor, the topmost one. “Out,” Zolraag said, and Moishe obeyed again. Zolraag led him along the hallway to a suite of rooms that made the one where the Russies were confined seem prisonlike indeed. A Lizard who wore strange body paint-the right side fairly plain, the left fancier than any Moishe had seen till now-spoke with Zolraag at the doorway, then ducked back into the suite.

  He returned a moment later. “Bring in the Big Ugly,” he said.

  “It shall be done, adjutant to the fleetlord,” Zolraag answered.

  They spoke their own language, but Moishe managed to follow it. “The fleetlord?” he said, and was proud that, despite his surprise, he’d remembered to add an interrogative cough. The Lizards ignored him even so. He hadn’t even thought the fleetlord was on the face of the Earth.

  Atvar’s body paint was like that of Pshing’s left side, only all over. Other than that, he looked like a Lizard to Russie. He was able to tell one of the aliens from another, but only after he’d known him for a while.

  Zolraag said, “Exalted Fleetlord, I present to you the Tosevite Moishe Russie, who is at last returned to our custody.”

  “I greet you, superior sir,” Moishe said, as politely as he could: no point in insulting the chief Lizard over anything inconsequential.

  He turned out to be wrong even so. “ ‘I greet you,Exalted Fleetlord,” Zolraag said sharply. Moishe repeated the phrase, this time with the right honorific. “That is better,” Zolraag told him.

  Atvar, meanwhile, was studying him from head to toe, eye turrets swinging up and down independently of each other in the unnerving way Lizards had. The fleetlord spoke in his own language, too fast for Moishe to stay with him. Seeing that, Zolraag translated his words into German: “The exalted fleetlord wants to know if you are now satisfied as to the overwhelming power of the Race.”

  The word he used to translateRace into German wasVolk. That raised Moishe’s hackles all over again: the Nazis had usedVolk for their own ends. He had to bring himself back under conscious control before answering, “Tell the fleetlord I am not. If the Race had overwhelming power, this war would have been over a long time ago.”

  He wondered if that would anger Atvar. He hoped not. He had to be careful about what he said, much less for his own sake than for Rivka’s and Reuven’s. To his relief, Atvar’s mouth fell open. The Lizard’s sharp little teeth and long, forked tongue were not delightful sights in and of themselves, but they meant the fleetlord was amused rather than annoyed.

  “Truth,” Atvar said, a word Russie knew. He nodded to show he understood. Atvar went on in the Lizards’ speech, again too quickly for Moishe to keep up. Zolraag translat
ed once more: “The exalted fleetlord has learned, from me among others, that you opposed having the Jews rise on our behalf when we entered Palestine. Why did you do this, when you supported us against the Germans in Poland?”

  “Two reasons,” Moishe said. “First, I know better now than I did then that you plan to rule all of mankind forever, and I cannot support that. Second, the Germans in Poland were slaughtering Jews, as you know. The British in Palestine were doing no such thing. Some of the Jews who back you there had escaped from Germany or from Poland. You seem more dangerous to me than the British do.”

  Zolraag translated that into the Lizards’ hisses and pops and squeaks. Atvar spoke again, this time slowly, aiming his words directly at Moishe: “These other males who escaped do not think as you do. Why is this?”

  Moishe did his best to answer in the language of the Race: “Other males see short. I look for long. In long, Race worse, British better.” To show how strongly he believed that, he ended with an emphatic cough.

  “It is good that you think of the long term. Few Big Uglies do,” Atvar said. “It may even be that, from the point of view of a Big Ugly who does not wish to come under the rule of the Race, you are right.” He paused and turned both eye turrets toward Moishe’s face. “This will not help you, though.”

  The Lizards had replaced the human-made furniture in the suite with their own gear. It made the room in which Russie stood appear even larger than it really was. One of the many devices with blank glass screens lit up, suddenly showing a Lizard’s face. The Lizard’s voice came out of the machine, too.A telephone with a cinema attachment, Moishe thought.

  By the way Atvar’s adjutant jerked at whatever the message was, he might have stuck his tongue into a live electrical socket. He turned one eye turret back toward Atvar and said, “Exalted Fleetlord!”

  “Not now, Pshing,” Atvar replied with very human impatience.

  But the adjutant-Pshing-kept talking. Atvar hissed something Russie didn’t understand and whirled away from him toward the screen. As he did so, the Lizard’s face disappeared from it, to be replaced by a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into the sky. Moishe gasped in horror. He’d seen one of those clouds on his way to Palestine, rising over what had been Rome.

  The sound he made seemed to remind Atvar he was there. The fleetlord turned one eye turret toward Zolraag for a moment and snapped, “Get him out of here.”

  “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Zolraag said. He turned to Russie. “Go now. The exalted fleetlord has more important things with which to concern himself at the moment than one insignificant Big Ugly.”

  Moishe went. He said nothing until the infantry combat vehicle that had brought him to Atvar’s headquarters started back toward the hotel in which he was imprisoned. Then he asked, “Where did that atomic bomb explode?”

  Zolraag let out a hiss that made him sound like an unhappy samovar. “So you recognized it, did you? The place is part of this province of Egypt. I gather it has two names, in your sloppy Tosevite fashion. It is called both El Iskandariya and Alexandria. Do you know either of these names?”

  “Someone bombed Alexandria?” Moishe exclaimed.“Vay iz mir! Who? How? You of the Race control all this country, don’t you?”

  “I thought we did,” Zolraag answered. “Evidently not, yes? Who? We do not know. The British, taking revenge for what we did to Australia? We did not-do not-believe them to have weapons of this sort. Could they have borrowed one from the Americans?”

  He sounded as if he meant the question seriously. Moishe made haste to reply: “I have no idea, superior sir.”

  “No?” Zolraag said. “Yet you broadcast for the British. We must investigate further.” Ice ran up Russie’s back. The Lizard went on, “The Deutsche, fighting us as best they could? We do not know-but when we learn which Big Uglies did this, they will pay a great price.”

  Something Zolraag had said got through to Moishe slower than it should have. “Australia, superior sir? What happened in Australia?”

  “We destroyed two cities to secure our conquests there,” the former Polish provincelord answered with chilling indifference before returning to a previous question: “How? We do not know that, either. We detected no airplanes, no missiles, no boats moving over the water. We do not believe the bomb could have been smuggled in by land, either; we would have found it in our searches of cargo.”

  “Not over water, not by air, not on land?” Moishe said. “That doesn’t leave much. Did someone dig a tunnel and set the bombunder Alexandria?”

  Zolraag made more horrified-teakettle noises, then burst out, “You Tosevites have not the technology to accomplish this!” That was when he figured out Russie had been offering a jest, however feeble. “Not funny,Reb Moishe,” he said, and used an emphatic cough to show how unfunny it was.

  Nobody had called MoisheReb since he’d left Warsaw. Then he’d thought the Lizards had come in answer to his prayer to make the Nazis leave off persecuting the Jews in the ghetto they’d established. People had gained hope from that. Now he saw that the Lizards, while they didn’t hate Jews in particular, were more dangerous for the rest of the world than the Nazis had dreamt of being. Two Australian cities, destroyed without provocation? No matter how sweltering the air inside the armored fighting vehicle, he shivered.

  Heinrich Jager peered down into the Panther’s engine compartment. “Fuel-pump gasket again?” he growled. “God in heaven, how long does it take for them to get the fabrication right?”

  Gunther Grillparzer pointed to the lot number stenciled in white paint on the black rubber gasket. “This is an old one, sir,” he said. “Probably dates back to the first couple of months’ production run.”

  That did little to console Jager. “We’re damned lucky the engine didn’t catch fire when it failed. Whoever shipped it out to us ought to be horsewhipped.”

  “Ahh, give the dumb bastard a noodle and put somebody else in his job,” Grillparzer said, using SS slang for a bullet in the back of the neck. He’d probably picked that up from Otto Skorzeny. He probably wasn’t joking, either. Jager knew how things worked in German factories these days. With so many German men at the front, a lot of people doing production work were Jews, Russians, Frenchmen, and other slave laborers subject to just that kind of punishment if they made the slightest mistake.

  “Is the replacement a new one?” Jager demanded.

  Grillparzer checked the lot number. “Yes, sir,” he answered. “We slap that in there, it shouldn’t give us any trouble till-the next time, anyhow.” On that optimistic note, he grabbed a screwdriver and attacked the fuel pump.

  Off in the distance, a flight of rockets screamed away toward the Lizard lines. Jager winced at the horrible noise. He’d been on the receiving end of Stalin-organ concertos when the Red Army lobbedKatyushas at theWehrmacht before the Lizards came. If you wanted to tear up a whole lot of ground in a hurry, rockets were the way to do it.

  They didn’t bother Skorzeny at all. “Someone will be catching hell,” he said cheerfully. Then, lowering his voice so only Jager could hear, he went on, “Almost as good as the pasting we gave Alexandria.”

  “Ah, that was us, was it?” Jager said, just as softly. Skorzeny-heard things. “The radio hasn’t claimed it for theReich.”

  “The radio bloody well isn’t going to claim it for theReich, either,” the SS man answered. “If we take credit for it, one of our towns goes right off the map. Cologne, maybe, or Frankfurt, or Vienna. May happen anyway, but we’re not going to brag and help it along, not when we can keep quiet and smile mysteriously. If you know what I mean.” Maybe his smile was intended to be mysterious, but it ended up looking raffish.

  Jager asked, “Do you know how we did it? That’s a mystery to me.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do, but I’m not supposed to tell,” Skorzeny said. Jager picked a branch up off the ground and made as if to hit him with it. Skorzeny chuckled. “Shit, I never have been any good at doing what I’m supposed to.
You know you can’t fit one of those bombs on a plane or a rocket, right?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jager said. “Remember, I got involved in that project deeper than I wanted to. You mad bastard, that was your fault, too. If I hadn’t been on that raid with you that snatched the explosive mend from the Lizards-”

  “-You’d have stayed a Soviet puppet and you’d probably be dead by now,” Skorzeny broke in. “If the Lizards didn’t get you, the Bolsheviks would have. But that’s neither here nor there. We didn’t put it on a freighter, either, the way we did when we blasted Rome. Hard to fool the Lizards the same way twice.”

  Jager walked along, thinking hard. He scratched the side of his jaw. He needed a shave. He had a straight razor, but scraping his face without shaving soap hurt more than it was worth. At length, he said, “We couldn’t have sent it in overland. Insane even to think about it. That leaves-nothing I can see.”

  “Nothing the Lizards can see, either.” Skorzeny grinned an evil grin. “They’d be tearing their hair if they had any. But I know something they don’t know.” He almost chanted the words, as if he were a little boy taunting the other children on the schoolyard. He thumped his finger off Jager’s chest. “I know something you don’t know, too.”

  “That’s all right,” Jager said. “I know I’m going to boot you in the arse if you don’t spill it. How did we burn the library at Alexandria?”

  Like most classical allusions, that one sailed past Skorzeny. He answered the main question, though: “I know we have a new kind of U-boat, that’s what I know. Damned if I know how, but it can do 450 kilometers submerged every centimeter of the way.”

  “God in heaven,” Jager said in genuine awe. “If the Lizards hadn’t come, we’d have swept the Atlantic clean with boats like that.” He scratched his jaw again, visualizing a map of the eastern Mediterranean. “It must have sailed from-Crete?”

  Skorzeny’s blunt features registered a curious blend of respect and disappointment. “Aren’t you the clever chap?” he said. “Yes, from Crete to Alexandria you can sail underwater-as long as you understand you won’t sail back.”