Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “Mm, yes, there is that.” Jager did some more muffing. “You couldn’t tell the whole crew-there’d be a mutiny. But you could find a man you could rely on to press the button or flip the switch or whatever he had to do.” He took off his black service cap in respect for the courage of that man.

  “Has to be how they did it, all right,” Skorzeny agreed. “One thing-he’d never know what hit him.”

  Jager thought of the fireball he’d seen going up east of Breslau, the one that had stalled the Lizards’ attack on the town. He tried to imagine being at the center of that fireball. “You’re right,” he said. “You might as well drop a man into the sun.”

  “That’s what it would be like, sure enough,” the SS man said. He walked along beside Jager, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. After half a dozen paces or so, he asked, ever so casually, “Your Jewish chums down in Lodz send any messages back to you? They gloating that they got the better of me?”

  “I haven’t heard a word from them,” Jager answered truthfully. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d stopped trusting Germans altogether after that bill of goods you tried selling them.” And there, he thought, was a fine euphemism for a nerve-gas bomb. If you couldn’t speak straight out about the things you did, maybe you shouldn’t have done them. In pointed tones, he went on, “They are still keeping the Lizards from using Lodz as a staging point against us, in spite of everything.”

  “Goody for them,” Skorzeny said with a fine sardonic sneer. He thumped Jager on the back, hard enough that he almost went headlong into the trunk of a birch tree. “Not so long from now, that won’t matter, either.”

  “No?” Apprehension trickled down Jager’s spine. Skorzenydid hear things. “Are they going to order us to try to reduce the town? I’m not sure we can do it-and even if we manage, street fighting’ll play hob with our armor.”

  Skorzeny laughed, loud and long. From up in that birch tree, a squirrel chattered indignantly. “No, they’re not going to stick your dick in the sausage machine, Jager,” he said. “How do I put it? If we can give the Lizards a present in Alexandria, we can give them and the Jews one in Lodz.”

  Jager was a Lutheran. He wished he’d grown up Catholic. Crossing himself would have been a comfort. There could be no mistaking what Skorzeny meant. “How will you get it into Lodz?” he asked, genuinely curious. “The Jews will never trust you-trust us-again. They’re liable to have warned the Poles, too. God. If they know what’s in that bomb of yours, they’re liable to have warned the Lizards.”

  “Fuck the Lizards. Fuck the Poles. And fuck the Jews, too,” Skorzeny said. “I won’t take anybody’s help with this one. When the package gets here, I’ll deliver it personally.”

  “You have to work,” David Nussboym said in the language of the Lizards. He used an emphatic cough. “If you don’t work, they’ll starve you or they’ll just kill you.” As if to underscore his words, men with submachine guns surrounded Alien Prisoner Barracks Number 3.

  The Lizards in the barracks hissed and squeaked and muttered among themselves. Their spokesman, the male called Ussmak, answered, “So what? For what they feed us, the work is impossibly hard. We starve anyhow. If they kill us quickly, it will all be over. Our spirits will join those of Emperors departed, and we will be at peace.” He cast down his eyes. So did the rest of the Lizards who listened to the talk.

  Nussboym had seen Lizards in Lodz do likewise when they spoke of their sovereign. They believed in the spirits of Emperors past as passionately as ultraorthodox Jews in God or good Communists in the dictatorship of the proletariat. They were also right about the rations they got. None of that mattered much to Nussboym. If he didn’t get these Lizards working again, out he’d go to the timber-cutting detail he’d escaped when they arrived. The rations human woodchoppers got were made for slow starvation, too.

  “What can the camp administrators do that would put you back to work?” he asked Ussmak. He was ready to make extravagant promises. Whether the NKVD men who ran the camp would keep them was another matter. But once the Lizards again got into the habit of working, they’d keep at it.

  At lot of Lizards were naive and trusting by human standards. Ussmak proved he wasn’t one of those. “They can leave. They can die,” he answered, his mouth dropping open in a laugh surely sardonic.

  “Truth,” several males echoed from their crowded bunks.

  “Fsseffel’s gang is working as ordered,” Nussboym said, trying another tack. “They are meeting norms in all areas.” He didn’t know whether that last bit was true or not, but Ussmak had no way to contest it: contact between his barracks hall and the one where Fsseffel was headman had been cut off as soon as the males here began their strike.

  “Because Fsseffel is a fool, do not think I am a fool, too,” Ussmak replied. “We will not be worked to death. We will not be starved to death. Until we believe we will not be overworked or underfed, we will not do anything.”

  Nussboym glanced out toward the NKVD guards. “They could come in here, drag a few of you outside, and shoot you,” he warned.

  “Yes, they could,” Ussmak agreed. “They would not get much work from the males they shot, though.” He laughed again.

  “I shall take your words to the commandant,” Nussboym said. He meant that for a warning, too, but did not think Ussmak was impressed. The Lizard seemed to him to have more depths of bitterness than any male of the Race Nussboym had known in Poland. He might almost have been a human being. In Poland, of course, the Race had kept prisoners. Males had not been prisoners there.

  When Ussmak declined to answer, Nussboym left the barracks. “Any luck?” one of the guards called to him in Russian. He shook his head. He did not like the scowl on the guard’s face. He also did not like going back to the hodgepodge of Polish, Russian, and Yiddish he used to communicate with his fellow humans here in the camp. Making himself understood was sometimes easier in the Lizards’ language.

  The leader of the guards who surrounded the barracks was a gloomy captain named Marchenko. “Comrade Captain, I need to speak with Colonel Skriabin,” Nussboym said.

  “Maybe you do.” Marchenko had some kind of accent-Ukrainian, Nussboym thought-that made him even harder to understand than most Russians. “But does he need to speak to you?” From him, that passed for wit. After a moment, scowling still, he nodded. “All right. Pass back into the old camp.”

  The camp administrative offices were better built, better heated, and far less crowded than thezeks’ barracks. Half the people working there werezeks, though: clerks and orderlies and what have you. It was far softer work than knocking down pines and birches in the woods, that was certain. His fellow prisoners eyed Nussboym with glances half conspiratorial, half suspicious: in a way, he was one of them, but his precise status wasn’t yet clear and might prove too high to suit a lot of them. The speed with which he won access to Skriabin prompted mutters among the file cabinets.

  “What news, Nussboym?” the NKVD colonel asked. Nussboym was not important enough to rate first name and patronymic from the short, dapper little man. On the other hand, Skriabin understood Polish, which meant Nussboym didn’t have to mumble along in his ugly makeshift jargon.

  “Comrade Colonel, the Lizards remain stubborn,” he said in Polish. As long as Skriabin called him by his surname, he couldn’t address the colonel as Gleb Nikolaievich. “May I state an opinion as to why this is so?”

  “Go ahead,” Skriabin said. Nussboym wasn’t sure just how smart he was. Shrewd, yes; of that there could be no doubt. But how much real Intelligence underlay that mental agility was a different question. Now he leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and gave Nussboym either his complete attention or a good facsimile of it.

  “Their reasons, I think, are essentially religious and irrational,” Nussboym said, “and for that reason all the more likely to be deeply and sincerely held.” He explained about the Emperor-worship that suffused the Race, finishing, “They may be willing to martyr themselves t
o join with Emperors gone by.”

  Skriabin closed his eyes for a little while. Nussboym wondered if the NKVD man had listened at all, or if he would start to snore at any moment. Then, all at once, Skriabin laughed, startling him. “You are wrong,” he said. “We can get them back to work-and with ease.”

  “I am sorry, Comrade Colonel, but I do not see how.” Nussboym didn’t like having to admit incapacity of any sort. The NKVD was only too likely to assume that. If he didn’t know one thing, he didn’t know anything, and so to dispense with his services. He knew things like that happened.

  But Colonel Skriabin seemed amused, not angry. “Perhaps you are naive and innocent. Perhaps you are merely ignorant. Either one would account for your blindness. Here is what you will tell this Ussmak who thinks we cannot persuade him to do what the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union require of him-” He spoke for some little while, then asked, “Now do you see?”

  “I do,” Nussboym said with respect grudging but nonetheless real. Either Skriabin was very shrewd or genuinely clever.

  He got no chance to think about which, for the NKVD man said, “Now march back there this instant and show that Lizard he cannot set his naked will against the historical dialectic impelling the Soviet Union ahead to victory.”

  “I shall go, Comrade Colonel,” Nussboym said. He had his own opinions about the historical dialectic, but Skriabin hadn’t asked him about them. With luck, Skriabin wouldn’t.

  Captain Marchenko glowered at Nussboym when he returned. It didn’t faze him; Marchenko glowered at everyone all the time. Nussboym went into the barracks full of striking Lizards. “If you do not go back to work, some of you will be killed,” he warned. “Colonel Skriabin is fierce and determined.”

  “We are not afraid,” Ussmak said. “If you kill us, the spirits of Emperors past will watch over us.”

  “Will they?” David Nussboym asked. “Colonel Skriabin tells me many of you males here are mutineers who murdered your own officers. Even those who did not, have surely given secrets of the Race to the Soviet Union. Why would the Emperors want anything to do with your spirits?”

  Appalled silence crashed down inside the rebellious barracks. Then the Lizards started talking among themselves in low voices, mostly too fast for Nussboym to follow. He got the drift, though: that was something the Lizards might have thought privately but bad never dared speak aloud. He gave Skriabin credit for understanding the way the aliens’ minds worked.

  At last, Ussmak said, “You Big Uglies go straight for the killing shot, don’t you? I have not abandoned the Empire, not in my spirit, but the Emperors may have abandoned me. This is truth. Dare I take the chance of finding out? Darewe take the chance of finding out?” He turned to the prisoners and put the question to them.

  In Poland, the Lizards had derisively called democracysnoutcounting. Here they were using something uncommonly like it to hash the matter out for themselves. Nussboym didn’t say anything about that. He stood waiting till they were done arguing, and tried to follow the debate as best he could.

  “We will work,” Ussmak said. He sounded dull and defeated. “We do need more food, though. And-” He hesitated, then decided to go on: “If you can get us the herb ginger, it would help us through these long, boring days.”

  “I will put your requests to Colonel Skriabin,” Nussboym promised. He didn’t think the Lizards were likely to get more food. Nobody except the NKVD men, their trusties, and the cooks got enough to eat. Ginger was another story. If it drugged them effectively, they might get it.

  He walked out of the barracks. “Well?” Captain Marchenko barked at him.

  “The strike is over,” he answered in Polish, then added a German word to make sure the NKVD man got it:“Kaputt.” Marchenko nodded. He still looked unhappy with the world, but he didn’t look like a man about to hose down the neighborhood with his submachine gun, as he often did. He waved Nussboym back toward the original camp.

  As he returned, he saw Ivan Fyodorov limping back into camp, accompanied by a guard. The right leg of Fyodorov’s trousers was red with blood; his axe must have slipped, out there in the woods.

  “Ivan, are you all right?” Nussboym called.

  Fyodorov looked at him, shrugged, then looked away. Nussboym’s cheeks flamed. This wasn’t the first time since he’d become interpreter for the Lizards that he’d got the cold shoulder from the men of his former work gang. They made it all too clear he wasn’t one of them any more. He hadn’t been asked to rat on them or anything of the sort, but they treated him with the same mistrustful respect they gave any of the otherzeks who went out of their way to work with the camp administration.

  I’m just being realistic,he told himself. In Poland, the Lizards had been the power to propitiate, and he’d propitiated them. Only a fool would have thought the Germans a better choice. Well, God had never been shy about turning out fools in carload lots. That was how he’d ended up here, after all. No matter where a man was, he had to land on his feet. He was even serving mankind by helping the NKVD get the most from the Lizards. He reported what they wanted to Colonel Skriabin. Skriabin only grunted.

  Nussboym wondered why he felt so lonely.

  For the first time since George Bagnall had had the displeasure of making his acquaintance, Georg Schultz had kitted himself out in full German uniform rather than the motley mix of Nazi and Bolshevik gear he usually wore. Standing in the doorway of the house Bagnall, Ken Embry, and Jerome Jones shared, he looked large and mean and menacing.

  He sounded menacing, too. “You damned Englishmen, you had better clear out of Pleskau while you have the chance.” He gave the German version of the name of the Russian town. “You don’t clear out now, don’t bet anyone will let you next week. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Embry and Jones came up behind Bagnall. As if by chance, the pilot casually held a Mauser, while the radarman bore a Soviet PPSh 41 submachine gun. “We understand you,” Bagnall said. “Do you understand us?”

  Schultz spat in the mud by the doorway. “Try and do some people a favor and this is the thanks I get.”

  Bagnall looked at Embry. Embry looked at Jones. Jones looked at Bagnall. They all started to laugh. “Why the devil would you want to do us a favor?” Bagnall demanded. “Far as I can tell, you want to see us dead.”

  “Me especially,” Jones added. “I am not responsible for the fair Tatiana’s affections, or for the shifts thereof.” He spoke as he might have of blizzards or earthquakes or other ineluctable forces of nature.

  “If you’re dead, she can’t yank your trousers down-that’s so,” Schultz said. “But if you’re gone, she can’t yank your trousers down, either. One way or another, you aren’t going to be around long. I already told you that. You can clear out or you can end up dead-and you’d better figure out quick which one you aim to do.”

  “Who’s going to kill us?” Bagnall said. “You?” He let his eyes flick back to his companions. “Good luck.”

  “Don’t be aDummkopf,” Schultz advised him. “In real fighting, you three would just be-what do they say? — collateral damage, that’s it. Nobody would know you were dead till you started to stink. And there’s going to be real fighting, sure as hell. We’re going to set this town to rights, is what we’re going to do.”

  “Colonel Schindler says-” Bagnall began, and then stopped. Lieutenant General Chill’s second-in-command made most of the right noises about maintaining Soviet-German cooperation, but Bagnall had got the impression he was just making noise. Chill had thought working with the Russians the best way to defend Pskov against the Lizards. If Schindler didn’t-

  “Ah, see, you’re not so stupid after all,” Schultz said, nodding in sardonic approval. “If somebody draws you a picture, you can tell what’s on it. Very good.” He clicked his heels, as if to an officer of his own forces.

  “Why shouldn’t we go off to Brigadier German with news like this?” Ken Embry demanded. “You couldn’t stop us.” He made as if to p
oint his rifle at Schultz.

  “What, you think the Russians are blind and deaf and dumb like you?” Schultz threw back his head and laughed. “We fooled ’em good in ‘41. They won’t ever let us do that again. Doesn’t matter.” He rocked back on his heels, the picture of arrogant confidence. “We would have whipped ’em if the Lizards hadn’t come, and we’ll whip ’em here in Pleskau, too.”

  The first part of that claim was inherently unprovable. However much he didn’t care for it, Bagnall thought the second part likely to be true. The Soviet forces in and around Pskov were ex-partisans. They had rifles, machine guns, grenades, a few mortars. The Nazis had all that plus real artillery and some armor, though Bagnall wasn’t sure how much petrol they had for it. If it came to open war, theWehrmacht would win.

  Bagnall didn’t say anything about that. Instead, he asked, “Do you think you’re going to be able to keep the fair Tatiana”-die schone Tatiana;it was almost a Homeric epithet for the sniper-“as a pet? I wouldn’t want to fall asleep beside her afterwards, let me tell you.”

  A frown settled on Schultz’s face like a rain cloud. Plainly, he hadn’t thought that far ahead. In action, he probably let his officers do his thinking for him. After a moment, though, the cloud blew away. “She knows strength, Tatiana. When the forces of theReich have shown themselves stronger than the Bolsheviks, when I have shown myself stronger than she is-” He puffed out his chest and looked manly and imposing.

  The three RAF men looked at one another again. By their expressions, Embry and Jones were having as much trouble holding in laughter as Bagnall was. Tatiana Pirogova had been fighting the Germans since the war started, and only reluctantly went over to fighting the Lizards after they landed. If Schultz thought a Nazi win in Pskov would awe her into thinking him a GermanUbermensch, he was in for disappointment-probably painful, possibly lethal, disappointment.