Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Dressing head to foot inWehrmacht gear was something else again, he discovered. Taking on the complete aspect of the Nazi soldiers who had so brutalized Poland gave him a thrill of superstitious dread, no matter how secular he reckoned himself. But it had to be done. Bunim had threatened reprisals against the Jews if they tried to block Lizard movements through Lodz. Therefore, the attack would have to come outside of town, and would have to seem to come from German hands.

  Solomon Gruver, also decked out in German uniform, nudged him. He had greenery stuck onto his helmet with elastic bands, and was almost invisible in the woods off to the side of the road. “They should hit the first mines soon,” he said in a low voice distorted by his gas mask.

  Mordechai nodded. The mines were German, too, with casings of wood and glass to make them harder to detect. A crew charged with repairing the highway had done just that… among other things. Over this stretch of a couple of kilometers, the Lizards would have a very bumpy ride indeed.

  As usual, Gruver looked gloomy. “This is going to cost us a lot of men no matter what,” he said, and Anielewicz nodded again. Doing favors for the Germans was nothing he loved, especially after what the Germans had tried to do to the Jews of Lodz. But this favor, while it might help Germans like Heinrich Jager, wouldn’t do Skorzeny or the SS any good. So Anielewicz hoped.

  He peered through the eye lenses of his own gas mask toward the roadway. The air he breathed tasted flat and dead. The mask made him look like some pig-snouted creature as alien as any Lizard. It was German, too-the Germans knew all about gas warfare, and had been teaching it to the Jews even before the Lizards came.

  Whump!The harsh explosion announced a mine going off. Sure enough, a Lizard lorry lay on its side in the roadway, burning. From the undergrowth to either side of the road, machine guns opened up on it and on the vehicles behind it Farther off, a German mortar started lobbing bombs at the Lizard convoy.

  A couple of mechanized infantry combat vehicles charged off the road to deal with the raiders. To Anielewicz’s intense glee, they both hit mines almost at once. One of them began to burn; he fired at the Lizards who emerged from it. The other slewed sideways and stopped, a track blown off.

  The weapon with which Anielewicz hoped to do the most damage, though, involved no high explosives whatever: only catapults made with lengths of inner tube and wax-sealed bottles full of an oily liquid. As he and Gruver had learned, you could fling a bottle three hundred meters with old rubber like that, and three hundred meters was plenty far enough. From all sides, bottles of captured Nazi nerve gas rained down on the stalled head of the Lizard column. Still more landed farther down its length once the head had stalled. They didn’t all break, but a lot of them did.

  Lizards started dropping. They weren’t wearing masks. The stuff could nail you if it got on your skin, too. Since they wore only body paint, the Lizards were also at a disadvantage there-not that ordinary clothing was any sure protection. Mordechai had heard that the Germans made special rubber-impregnated uniforms for their troops who dealt with gas all the time. He didn’t know for certain whether it was true. It sounded typically German in its thoroughness, but wouldn’t you stew like a chicken in a pot if you had to fight cooped up in a rubber uniform for more than an hour or two at a stretch?

  “What do we do now?” Gruver asked, pausing to shove another clip into hisGewehr 98.

  “As soon as we’ve thrown all the gas we brought, we get out,” Anielewicz answered. “The longer we hang around, the better the chance the Lizards will capture some of us, and we don’t want that.”

  Gruver nodded. “If we can, we have to bring our dead away, too,” he said. “I don’t know how smart the Lizards are about these things, but if they’re smart enough, they can figure out we’re not really Nazis.”

  “There is that,” Mordechai agreed. The last time he’d been reminded of the obvious difference, Zofia Klopotowski had thought it was funny. Consequences springing from it would be a lot more serious here.

  The catapult-propelled bottles of nerve gas had a couple of advantages over more conventional artillery: neither muzzle flash nor noise gave away the positions of the launchers. Their crews kept flinging bottles till they were all gone.

  After that, the Jewish fighters pulled away from the road, their machine guns covering the retreat. They had several rendezvous points in the area: farms owned by Poles they could trust(Poles we hope we can trust, Mordechai thought as he neared one of them). There they got back into more ordinary clothes and stashed weapons of greater firepower than rifles. These days in Poland, you might as well have been naked as go out in public without a Mauser on your shoulder.

  Mordechai slipped back into Lodz from the west, well away from the direction of the fighting. It wasn’t long past noon when he strolled into the fire station on Lutomierska Street. Bertha Fleishman greeted him outside the building: “They say there was a Nazi raid this morning, just a couple of kilometers outside of town.”

  “Do they?” he answered gravely. “I hadn’t heard, though there was a lot of gunfire earlier in the day. But then, that’s so about one day in three.”

  “It must have been that what’s-his-name-Skorzeny, that’s it,” Bertha said. “Who else would be crazy enough to stick his nose in the wasps’ nest?”

  While they were standing there talking, the Order Police district leader who’d taken Anielewicz to Bunim approached the fire station. Oskar Birkenfeld still carried only a truncheon, and so waited respectfully for the rifle-toting Anielewicz to notice him. When Mordechai did, the man from the Order Police said, “Bunim requires your presence again, immediately.”

  “Does he?” Anielewicz said. “Whatever for?”

  “He’ll tell you that,” Birkenfeld answered, sounding tough-or as tough as he could when so badly outgunned. Anielewicz looked down his nose at him without saying anything. The Order Service man wilted, asking weakly, “Will you come?”

  “Oh, yes, I’ll come, though Bunim and his puppets could stand to learn better manners,” Mordechai said. Birkenfeld flushed angrily. Mordechai patted Bertha Fleishman on the shoulder. “I’ll see you later.”

  At his Bialut Market Square offices, Burnm stared balefully at Anielewicz. “What do you know of the Deutsche who severely damaged our advancing column this morning?”

  “Not much,” he answered. “I’d just heard it was a Nazi attack when your pet policeman came to fetch me. You can ask him about it after I go; he heard me get the news, I think.”

  “I shall ascertain this,” Bunim said. “So you deny any role in the attack on the column?”

  “Am I a Nazi?” Anielewicz said. “Bertha Fleishman, the woman I was talking with when Birkenfeld found me, thinks that Skorzeny fellow might have had something to do with it. I don’t know that for a fact, but I’ve heard talk he’s here in Poland somewhere, maybe to the north of Lodz.” If he could do the SS man a bad turn, he would.

  “Skorzeny?” Bunim flipped out his tongue but did not waggle it back and forth, a sign of interest among the Lizards. “Exterminating that one would be a whole clutch of eggs’ worth of ordinary Tosevites like you.”

  “Truth, superior sir,” Mordechai said. If Bunim wanted to think he was bumbling and harmless, that was fine with him.

  The Lizard said, “I shall investigate whether these rumors you report have any basis in fact. If they do, I shall bend every effort to destroying the troublesome male. Considerable status would accrue to me on success.”

  Mordechai wondered whether that last was intended for him or if Bunim was talking to himself. “I wish you good luck,” he said, and, despite having led the raid on that column moving north against the Germans, he meant what he told the Lizard.

  “Now we’re cooking with gas!” Omar Bradley said enthusiastically as he sat down in Leslie Groves’ office in the Science Building at the University of Denver. “You said the next bomb wouldn’t be long in coming, and you meant it.”

  “If I told lies about things like
that, you-or somebody-would throw my fanny out of here and bring in a man who delivered on his promises,” Groves answered. He cocked his head to one side. Off in the distance, artillery still rumbled. Denver did not look like falling, though, not now. “And you, sir, you’ve done a hell of a job defending this place.”

  “I’ve had good help,” Bradley said. They both nodded, pleased with each other. Bradley went on, “Doesn’t look like we’ll have to use that second bomb anywhere near here. We can try moving it someplace else where they need it worse.”

  “Yes, sir. One way or another, we’ll manage that,” Groves said. The rail lines going in and out of Denver had taken a hell of a licking, but there were ways. Break the thing down into pieces and it could go out on horseback-provided all the riders got through to the place where you needed all the pieces.

  “I figure we will,” Bradley agreed. He started to reach into his breast pocket, but arrested the motion halfway through. “All this time and I still can’t get used to going without a smoke.” He let out a long, weary exhalation. “That should be the least of my worries-odds are I’ll live longer because of it.”

  “Certainly seem longer, anyhow,” Groves said. Bradley chuckled, but sobered in a hurry. Groves didn’t blame him. He too had bigger worries than tobacco. He voiced the biggest one: “Sir, how long can we and the Lizards keep going tit for tat? After a while, there won’t be a lot of places left. If we keep on trading them the way we have been.”

  “I know,” Bradley said, his long face somber. “Dammit, General, I’m just a soldier, same as you. I don’t make policy, I just carry it out, best way I know how. Making it is President Hull’s job. I’ll tell you what I told him, though. If you want to hear it.”

  “Hell, yes, I want to hear it,” Groves answered. “If I understand what I’m supposed to be doing, figuring out how to do it gets easier.”

  “Not everybody thinks that way,” Bradley said. “A lot of people want to concentrate on their tree and forget about the forest. But for whatever you think it’s worth, my view is that the only fit use for the bombs we have is to make the Lizards sit down at the table and talk seriously about ending this war. Any peace that lets us preserve our bare independence is worth making, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Our bare independence?” Groves tasted the words. “Not even all our territory? That’s a hard peace to ask for, sir.”

  “Right now, I think it’s the best we can hope to get. Considering the Lizards’ original war aims, even getting that much won’t be easy,” Bradley said. “That’s why I’m so pleased with your efforts here. Without your bombs, we’d get licked.”

  “Even with them, we’re getting licked,” Groves said. “But we aren’t getting licked fast, and we are making the Lizards pay like the dickens for everything they get.”

  “That’s the idea,” Bradley agreed. “They came here with resources they couldn’t readily renew. How many of them have they expended? How many do they have left? How many more can they afford to lose?”

  “Those are the questions, sir,” Groves said.“The questions.”

  “Oh, no. There’s one other that’s even more important,” Bradley said. Groves raised an interrogative eyebrow. Bradley explained: “Whetherwe have anything left by the timethey start scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

  Groves grunted. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Nuclear fire blossomed above a Tosevite city. Seen from a reconnaissance satellite, the view was beautiful. From up at the topmost edges of the atmosphere, you didn’t get the details of what a bomb did to a city. Riding in a specially protected vehicle, Atvar had been through the ruins of El Iskandariya. He’d seen firsthand what the Big Uglies’ bomb had done there. It wasn’t beautiful, not even slightly.

  Kirel had not made that tour, though of course he had viewed videos from that strike and others, by both the Race and the Tosevites. He said, “And so we retaliate with this Copenhagen place. Where does it end, Exalted Fleetlord?”

  “Shiplord, I do not know where it ends or even if it ends,” Atvar answered. “The psychologists recently brought me a translated volume of Tosevite legends in the hope they would help me-would help the Race as a whole-better understand the foe. The one that sticks in my mind tells of a Tosevite male fighting an imaginary monster with many heads. Every time he cut one off, two more grew to take its place. That is the predicament in which we presently find ourselves.”

  “I see what you are saying, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “Hitler, the Deutsch not-emperor, has been screaming over every radio frequency he can command about the vengeance he will wreak on us for what he calls the wanton destruction of a Nordic city. Our semanticists are still analyzing the precise meaning of the termNordic.”

  “I don’t care what it means,” Atvar snapped petulantly. “All I care about is carrying the conquest to a successful conclusion, and I am no longer certain we shall be able to accomplish that.”

  Kirel stared at him with both eyes. He understood why. Even when things seemed grimmest, he had refused to waver from faith in the ultimate success of the Race’s mission. He had, he admitted to himself, repeatedly been more optimistic than the situation warranted.

  “Do you aim to abandon the effort, then, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked, his voice soft and cautious. Atvar understood that caution, too. If Kirel didn’t like the answer he got, he was liable to foment an uprising against Atvar, as Straha had done after the first Tosevite nuclear explosion. If Kirel led such an uprising, it was liable to succeed.

  And so Atvar also answered cautiously: “Abandon it? By no means. But I begin to believe we may not be able to annex the entire land surface of this world without suffering unacceptable losses, both to our own forces and to that surface. We must think in terms of what the colonization fleet will find when it arrives here and conduct ourselves accordingly.”

  “This may involve substantive discussions with the Tosevite empires and not-empires now resisting us,” Kirel said.

  Atvar could not read the shiplord’s opinion of that. He was not sure of his own opinion about it, either. Even contemplating it was entering uncharted territory. The plans with which the Race had left Home anticipated the complete conquest of Tosev 3 in a matter of days, not four years-two of this planet’s slow turns around its star-of grueling warfare with the result still very much in the balance. Maybe now the Race would have to strike a new balance, even if it wasn’t one in the orders the Emperor had conferred upon Atvar before he went into cold sleep.

  “Shiplord, in the end it may come to that,” he said. “I still hope it does not-our successes in Florida, among other places, give me reason to continue to hope-but in the end it may. And what have you to say to that?”

  Kirel let out a soft, wondering hiss. “Only that Tosev 3 has changed us in ways we could never have predicted, and that I do not care for change of any sort, let alone change inflicted upon us under such stressful circumstances.”

  “I do not care for change, either,” Atvar answered. “What sensible male would? Our civilization has endured for as long as it has precisely because we minimize the corrosive effect of wanton change. But in your words I hear the very essence of the difference between us and the Big Uglies. When we meet change, we feel it is inflicted on us. The Tosevites reach out and seize it with both hands, as if it were a sexual partner for which they have developed the monomaniacal passion they termlove.” As well as he could, he reproduced the word from the Tosevite language called English: because it was widely spoken and even more widely broadcast, the Race had become more familiar with it than with most of the other tongues the Big Uglies used.

  “Would Pssafalu the Conqueror have negotiated with the Rabotevs?” Kirel asked. “Would Hisstan the Conqueror have negotiated with the Hallessi? What would their Emperors have said if word reached them that our earlier conquests had not achieved the goals set for them?”

  What he was really asking was what the Emperor would say when he learned the conquest of Tosev 3
might not be a complete conquest. Atvar said, “Here speed-of-light works with us. Whatever he says, we shall not know about it until near the time when the colonization fleet arrives, or perhaps even a few years after that.”

  “Truth,” Kirel said. “Until then, we are autonomous.”

  Autonomous,in the language of the Race, carried overtones ofalone orisolated orcut off from civilization. “Truth,” Atvar said sadly. “Well, Shiplord, we shall have to make the best of it, for ourselves and for the Race as a whole, of which we are, and remain, a part.”

  “As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. “With so much going on in such strange surroundings at so frenetic a pace, keeping that basic fact in mind is sometimes difficult.”

  “Is frequently difficult, you mean,” Atvar said. “Even without the battles, there are so many irritations here. That psychological researcher the Big Uglies in China have kidnapped… They state it is in reprisal for his studies of a newly hatched Tosevite. How can we do research on the Big Uglies if our males go in fear of having vengeance taken on them for every test they make?”

  “It is a problem, Exalted Fleetlord, and I fear it will only grow worse,” Kirel said. “Since we received word of this kidnapping, two males have already abandoned ongoing research projects on the surface of Tosev 3. One has taken his subjects up to an orbiting starship, which is likely to skew his results. The other has also gone aboard a starship, but has terminated his project. He states he is seeking a new challenge.” Kirel waggled his eye turrets, a gesture of irony.

  “I had not heard that,” Atvar said angrily. “He should be strongly encouraged to return to his work: if necessary, by kicking him out the air lock of that ship.”

  Kirel’s mouth fell open in a laugh. “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.”

  “Exalted Fleetlord!” The image of Pshing, Atvar’s adjutant, suddenly filled one of the communicator screens in the fleetlord’s chamber. It was the screen reserved for emergency reports. Atvar and Kirel looked at each other. As they’d just said, the conquest of Tosev 3 was nothing but a series of emergencies.