Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Sweat burst from Rance Auerbach’s forehead. “Come on, darling,” Penny Summers breathed. “You can do it. I know you can. You done it before, remember? Come on-big strong man like you can do whatever he wants.”

  Auerbach gathered himself, gasped, grunted, and, with an effort that took everything he had in him, heaved himself upright on his crutches. Penny clapped her hands and kissed him on the cheek. “Lord, that’s hard,” he said, catching his breath Maybe he was light-headed, maybe just too used to lying flat on his back, but the ground seemed to quiver like pudding under him.

  His arms weren’t strong, either; supporting so much of his weight with his armpits was anything but easy. His wounded leg didn’t touch the ground, and wouldn’t for a long time yet. Getting around with one leg and two crutches felt like using an unsteady photographic tripod instead of his proper equipment.

  Penny took a couple of steps back from him, toward the opening of the Lizards’ shelter tent. “Come on over to me,” she said.

  “Don’t think I can yet,” Auerbach answered. This was only the third or fourth time he’d tried the crutches. Starting to move on them was as hard as getting an old Nash’s motor to turn over on a snowy morning.

  “Oh, I bet you can.” Penny ran her tongue across her lips. She’d gone from almost completely withdrawn to just as brazen with next to nothing in between. When he had time to think, Auerbach wondered if they were two sides of the same coin. He didn’t have time to think right this second. Penny went on, “You come on over to me now, and tonight I’ll…” What she said she’d do would have sent a man hurt a lot worse than Auerbach over to her in nothing flat, maybe less. He let himself fall forward, hopped on his good leg, brought the crutches up to help keep his balance, straightened, did it again, and found himself by her side.

  From outside the tent, a dry voice said, “That’s the best incentive for physical therapy I’ve ever heard.” Auerbach almost fell down. Penny squeaked and turned the color of the beets that grew so widely in Colorado.

  By the way his own face heated, Auerbach was pretty sure he was the same color. “Uh, sir, it’s not-” he began, but then his tongue stumbled to a halt even more readily than his poor damaged carcass had.

  The doctor stepped into the tent. He was a young fellow, a stranger, not one of the Lizards’ POW medicos. He looked from Auerbach to Penny Summers and back again. “Look, folks, I don’t care if it is or it isn’t-none of my business any which way. If it makes you get up and walk, soldier, that’s what matters to me.” He paused judiciously. “In my professional opinion, an offer like that would make Lazarus get up and walk.”

  Penny blushed even redder than she had before. Auerbach had had more experience with Army docs. They did their level best to embarrass you, and their level best was usually pretty damn good. He said, “Uh-who are you, sir?” The doctor had gold oak leaves on his shoulder straps.

  “My name’s Hayward Smithson-” The doctor paused. Rance gave his own name and rank. After a minute, Penny Summers stammered out her name, too, her right one; Auerbach wouldn’t have been surprised to hear her come up with an alias on the spot. Major Smithson went on, “Now that the cease-fire’s in place, I’m down from Denver inspecting the care the Lizards have been giving to wounded prisoners. I see you’ve got a set of government-issue crutches there. Good.”

  “Yes, sir,” Auerbach said. His voice was still weak and thin and raspy as all get out, as if he’d smoked about fifty packs of Camels in the last hour and a half. “I got ’em day before yesterday.”

  “They came in a week ago,” Penny said, “but Rance-uh, Captain Auerbach-he wasn’t able to do much in the way of moving around till just the other day.”

  Auerbach waited for Smithson to make a crack about Penny’s having done most of the moving before then, but, to his relief, Smithson had mercy. Maybe nailing her again would have been too much like shooting fish in a barrel. Instead, the doctor said, “You took one in the chest and one in the leg, eh, and they’ve pulled you through?”

  “Yes, sir,” Auerbach said. “They’ve done their best by me, the Lizards and the people they’ve got helping them. Sometimes I’ve felt kind of like a guinea pig, but I’m here and on my pins-well, on one pin, anyway-instead of taking up space in the graveyard back of town.”

  “More power to you, Captain,” Smithson said. He pulled a spiral-bound notebook and a fountain pen out of his pocket and scribbled a note to himself. “I have to say, I’ve been favorably impressed with what I’ve seen of the Lizards’ facilities. They’ve done what they could for the men they’ve captured.”

  “They’ve treated me okay,” Auerbach said. “Firsthand, that’s all I can tell you. I got outside this tent yesterday for the very first time.”

  “What about you, Miss, uh, Summers?” Major Smithson asked. “Captain Auerbach’s not the only patient you’ve nursed back to health, I expect.”

  Auerbach devoutly hoped he was the only patient Penny had nursed back to health that particular way. He didn’t think she noticed the possible double entendre there, and was just as well pleased she didn’t. Seriously, she answered, “Oh, no, sir. I get all over this encampment. They do their best. I really think so.”

  “That’s also the impression I’ve had,” Smithson said, nodding. “They do their best-but I think they’re overwhelmed.” He sighed wearily. “I think the whole world is overwhelmed.”

  “Are therethat many wounded, sir?” Auerbach asked. “Like I said, I haven’t seen much outside of this tent except through the doorflap since they put me here, and nobody’s told me there’s all that many wounded POWs here in Karval.” He sent Penny a look that might have been accusing. To the other nurses, to the harassed human doctors, to the Lizards, he was just another injured POW; he’d thought he meant something to her.

  But Smithson said, “It’s not just wounded soldiers, Captain. It’s-” He shook his head and didn’t try to explain. Instead, he went on, “You’ve been upright a good while now. Why don’t you come outside and have a look for yourself? You’ll have a doctor at your elbow, and who knows what Miss Summers will do for you or to you or with you after that?”

  Penny blushed for a third time. Auerbach wished he could give the doctor a shot in the teeth for talking about a lady that way in front of her, but he couldn’t. And he was curious about what was happening in the world beyond the tent, and he had been standing here a while without keeling over. “Okay, sir, lead on,” he said, “but don’t lead too fast, on account of I’m not going to win any races on these things.”

  Hayward Smithson and Penny held the tent flaps open so he could come out and look around. He advanced slowly. When he got out into the sunshine, he stood blinking for a moment, dazzled by its brilliance. And some of the tears that came to his eyes had nothing to do with the sun, but with his own delight at being unconfined. If only for a little while.

  “Come along,” Smithson said, positioning himself to Auerbach’s left. Penny Summers immediately put Rance between her and the doctor. A slow procession, they made their way along the open track the Lizards had left between the rows of tents sheltering wounded men.

  Maybe there weren’tthat many wounded men, but it still made for a pretty fair tent city. Every so often, Auerbach heard a man moaning inside one of those domes of the bright orange slick stuff the Lizards used. Once, a doctor and nurse hurried into one a good ways away on the dead run. That didn’t look good, not even slightly. Smithson clicked his tongue between his teeth.

  The way he’d been talking, though, half of Denver might have been here, and that didn’t look to be so. Auerbach was puzzled till he came to the intersection of his lane with one that ran perpendicular to it. He hadn’t come so far before. When you looked down that crossroad in one direction, you saw what was left of the tiny town of Karval: in two words, not much. When you looked the other way, you got a different picture.

  He couldn’t guess how many refugees inhabited the shantytown out beyond the Lizards’ neat rows of te
nts. “It’s like a brand-new Hooverville,” he said, staring in disbelief.

  “It’s worse than a Hooverville,” Smithson said grimly. “Most Hoovervilles, they had boxes and boards and sheet metal and what have you to build shacks with. Not much of that kind of stuff here in the middle of nowhere. But people have come anyhow, from miles and miles around.”

  “I’ve watched that happen,” Penny said, nodding. “There’s food and water here for prisoners, so people come and try to get some. When the Lizards have anything left over, they give a little. That’s more’n people can get anywheres else, so they keep comin’.”

  “Lord,” Auerbach said in his ruined voice. “It’s a wonder they haven’t tried coming into the tents and stealing what the Lizards wouldn’t give ’em.”

  “Remember that gunfire the other night?” Penny asked. “A couple of ’em was tryin’ just that. The Lizards shot ’em down like they was dogs. I don’t reckon any more folks’ll try sneakin’ in where the Lizards don’t want ’em to.”

  “Sneaking up on the Lizards isn’t easy anyhow,” Dr. Smithson said.

  Auerbach looked down at himself, at the much-battered excuse for a carcass he’d be dragging around for the rest of his life.

  “Matter of fact, I found out about that. Sneaking away from ’em’s not so easy, either.”

  “They have Lizard doctors in Denver, looking out for their people that we caught?” Penny asked.

  “Yes-it’s all part of the cease-fire,” Smithson answered. “I almost wish I could have stayed in town to watch them work, too. If we don’t keep fighting them, they’re going to push our medicine forward a hundred years in the next ten or fifteen, we have so much to learn.” He sighed. “But this is important work, too. We may even be able to set up a large-scale prisoner exchange, wounded men for wounded Lizards.”

  “That would be good,” Auerbach said. Then he looked over at Penny, whose face bore a stricken expression. She wasn’t a wounded prisoner. He turned his head back toward Smithson. “Would the Lizards let noncombatants out?”

  “I don’t know,” the doctor answered. “I can understand why you’d want to find out, though. If this comes off-and there are no guarantees-I’ll see what I can do for you. How’s that?”

  “Thank you, sir,” Auerbach said, and Penny nodded. Auerbach’s gaze went toward the canvas tents and old wagons and shelters of brush housing the Americans who’d come to Karval to beg for crumbs of the Lizards’ largesse. Thinking about that brought home like a kick in the teeth what the war had done to the country. He looked down at himself. “You know something? I’m not so bad off after all.”

  The buzz of a human-built airplane over Cairo sent Moishe Russie hurrying to the windows of his hotel-room cell for a glimpse. Sure enough, there it was, painted lemon yellow as a mark of truce. “I wonder who’s in that one,” he said to Rivka.

  “You’ve said Molotov is already here,” she answered, “so that leaves von Ribbentrop”-she and her husband both donned expressions redolent of distaste-“and the American foreign minister, whatever his name is.”

  “Marshall,” Moishe said. “And they call him Secretary of State, for some reason.” He soaked up trivia, valuable or not, like a sponge; the book-learning in medical school had come easy for him because of that. Had his interest lain elsewhere, he would have made a formidableyeshiva-bucher. He turned back to the window. The yellow airplane was lower now, coming in for a landing at the airfield east of town. “That’s not a Dakota. Marshall would fly in one of those, I think. So it’s probably a German plane.”

  Rivka sighed. “If you see Ribbentrop, tell him every Jew in the world wished akholeriyeh on him.”

  “If he doesn’t know that by now, he’s pretty stupid,” Moishe said.

  “Tell him anyway,” his wife said. “You get a chance like that, you shouldn’t waste it.” The drone of the motors faded out of hearing. Rivka laughed, a little uneasily. “That used to be a sound you took for granted. Hearing it here, hearing it now-it’s very strange.”

  Moishe nodded. “When the truce talks started, the Lizards tried to insist on flying everyone here in their own planes. I suppose they didn’t want the Nazis-or anyone else-sending a plane full of bombs instead of diplomats. Atvar was very confused when the Germans and the Russians and the U.S.A. all said no. The Lizards haven’t really figured out what all negotiating as equals means. They’ve never had to do it before; they’re used to dictating.”

  “It shall be done,” Rivka said in the aliens’ hissing language. Anyone who was around them long learned that phrase. She dropped back into Yiddish: “That’s the way they think. It’s about the only way they think.”

  “I know,” Moishe answered. He made as if to pound his head against the wall.“Oy, do I know.”

  Through loudspeakers, the muezzins called the faithful to prayer. Cairo slowed down for a little while. Another bright yellow airplane flew low over the city, making for the airport. “That is a Dakota,” Rivka said, coming up to stand by Moishe. “So-Marshall? — is here, too, now.”

  “So he is,” Moishe answered. He felt as if he were setting up a game of chess with a friend back in Warsaw, and had just put the last couple of pieces where they belonged. “Now we see what happens next.”

  “What will you tell Atvar if he summons you to ask what you think of these people?” Rivka asked.

  Moishe used a few clicks and pops himself. “The exalted fleetlord? You mean, besidesgeh in drerd?” Rivka gave him a dangerous look, one that meant,Stop trying to be funny. He sighed and went on, “I don’t know. I’m not even sure why he keeps bringing me in to question me. I wasn’t-”

  Rivka made urgent shushing motions. Moishe shut up. He’d started to say something like,I wasn’t anywhere near the caliber of those people. Rivka was right. The Lizards surely monitored everything he said. If they hadn’t figured out for themselves how small a fish he was, no point telling them. Being thought more important than he was might improve both his treatment and his life expectancy.

  And sure enough, a couple of hours later Zolraag walked into the hotel room and announced, “You are summoned to the quarters of the exalted fleetlord Atvar. You will come immediately.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” Moishe answered. The Lizards certainly hadn’t bothered learning to negotiate with him as an equal. They told him where to go and what to do, and he perforce did it.

  The guards didn’t seem quite so eager to shoot him if he so much as stumbled as they had when the Lizards first brought him to Cairo. They still turned out for him full force, though, and transported him from hither to yon and back again in one of their armored personnel carriers, as uncomfortable a mode of travel for a human being as any ever invented.

  While they were on their way to Atvar’s headquarters, Zolraag remarked, “Your insights into the political strategies likely to be utilized are of interest to the exalted fleetlord. Having headed a not-empire yourself, you will be prepared to empathize with these other Tosevite males.”

  “That’s certainly better than being shot,” Moishe said gravely. He was glad he’d had practice holding his face straight. Yes, he’d headed up the Jews of Poland for a little while after the Lizards came, till he found he could no longer stand to obey them. To imagine that that put him in the same class as Hitler and Hull and Stalin-well, if you could imagine that, you had a vivid and well-stocked imagination. From what he’d gathered, anything smaller than the entire surface of a planet was too small for the Lizards to bother making what they reckoned subtle distinctions in size. The distinctions were anything but subtle to him, but he-thank God! — was not a Lizard.

  Atvar rounded on him as soon as he came into the machine-strewn suite the fleetlord occupied. “If we make an agreement with these males, is it your judgment they will abide by it?” he demanded, using Zolraag to translate his words into Polish and German.

  This to a man who’d watched Poland carved up between Germany and the USSR after they’d made their secret
agreement, and then watched them go to war against each other less than two years later in spite of the agreement still formally in force. Picking his words with care, Moishe answered, “They will-so long as they see keeping the agreement as being in their interest.”

  The fleetlord made more mostly unintelligible noises. Again, Zolraag interpreted for him: “You are saying, then, that these Tosevite males are altogether unreliable?”

  By any standard with which the Lizard was familiar, the answer to that had to beyes. Moishe didn’t think putting it so baldly would help end the fighting. He said, “You have much to offer that would be in their interest to accept. If you and they can agree upon terms for your males’ leaving their countries, for instance, they would probably keep any agreements that would prevent the Race from coming back.”

  As he’d seen with Zolraag’s efforts in Warsaw, the Lizards had only the vaguest notions of diplomacy. Things that seemed obvious even to a human being who had no governmental experience-to Moishe himself, for instance-sometimes struck the aliens with the force of revelation when they got the point. And sometimes, despite genuine effort, they didn’t get it.

  As now: Atvar said, “But if we yield to the demands of these importunate Tosevites, we encourage them to believe they are our equals.” After a moment, he added, “And if they believe themselves equal to us, soon they will come to think they are superior.”

  That last comment reminded Moishe the Lizards weren’t fools; they might be ignorant of the way one nation treated with another, but they weren’t stupid. Ignoring the difference could be deadly dangerous. Carefully, Moishe said, “What you have already done should make it plain to them that they are not your superiors. And what they have done to you should show you that you are not so much superior to them as you thought you were when you came to this world. When neither side is superior, isn’t talking better than fighting?”

  After Zolraag had translated what he’d said, Atvar fixed Russie with what certainly looked like a baleful stare. The fleetlord said, “When we came to Tosev 3, we thought you Big Uglies would still be the spear-flinging barbarians our probes of this planet had shown you to be. We discovered very soon we were not so superior as we had thought we would be when we went into cold sleep. It is the most unpleasant discovery the Race has ever known.” He added an emphatic cough.