Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “Of course they wouldn’t! The Germans are sensible soldiers; they learn from their mistakes. But after we drove the Lizards back from Chicago winter before last, what did they do? They slogged straight on ahead again, right back into the meat grinder. And they paid. That’s why. If these talks go the way they look to be going, they’re going to have to evacuate the whole U.S.A.”

  “That’d be wonderful, sir. If it happens,” Mutt said.

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Patton said. “Wonderful would be killing every one of them or driving them off our world here altogether.” One thing you had to give him, Mutt realized: he didn’t think small. He went on, “Since we can’t do that, worse luck, we’re going to have to learn to live with them henceforward.” He pointed across to the Lizards. “Has fraternization after the cease-fire been peaceful in this area, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir,” Daniels said. “Sometimes they come over and-I guess you’d call it talk shop, sir. And sometimes they want ginger. I reckon you know about that.”

  “Oh, yes,” Patton said with a chuckle. “I know about that. It was good to find out we weren’t the only ones with vices. For a while there, I did wonder. And when they get their ginger, what do they use to pay for it?”

  “Uh,” Mutt said. You couldn’t tell a lieutenant generaluh, though, so he continued, “This and that, sir. Souvenirs, sometimes: stuff that doesn’t mean anything to them, like us trading beads to the Indians. Medical-kit supplies sometimes, too. They got self-stick bandages that beat our kind all hollow.”

  Patton’s pale eyes glittered. “They ever trade-liquor for their ginger, Lieutenant? Has that ever happened?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s happened,” Mutt allowed cautiously, wondering if the sky would fall on him in the next moment.

  Patton’s nod was slow. His eyes still held Daniels. “Good. If you’d told me anything different, I’d know you were a liar. The Lizards don’t like whiskey-I told you they were fools. They’ll drink rum. They’ll even drink gin. But scotch, bourbon, rye? They won’t touch ’em. So if they can forage up something they don’t want and trade it for something they do, they think they’re getting the good half of the deal.”

  “We haven’t had any trouble with drunk and rowdy, sir,” Mutt said, which was close enough to true to let him come out with it straight-faced. “I ain’t tried to stop ’em from takin’ a nip when they come off duty, not since the cease-fire, but they got to be ready to fight all the time.”

  “You look like a man who’s seen a thing or two,” Patton said. “I won’t complain about the way you’re handling your men so long as they’re combat-ready, as you say. The Army isn’t in the business of producing Boy Scouts, is it, Lieutenant Daniels?”

  “No, sir,” Mutt said quickly.

  “That’s right,” Patton growled. “It’s not. Which is not to say-which is not to say for a moment-that neatness and cleanliness aren’t of importance for the sake of discipline and morale. I’m glad to see your uniform so tidy and in such good repair, Lieutenant, and even gladder to see those men over there bathing.” He pointed to the soldiers in the creek. “Too often, men at the front lines think Army regulations no longer apply to them. They are mistaken, and sometimes need reminding of it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Daniels said, knowing how filthy he and his uniform had been till he finally took the time to spruce up a couple of days earlier. He was glad Herman Muldoon wasn’t anywhere around-one look at Muldoon and Patton (whose chin was neatly shaved, whose uniform was not only clean but showed creases, and whose spit-shined shoes gave off dazzling reflections) would have flung him in the brig.

  “From the look of things, Lieutenant, you have a first-rate outfit here. Keep ’em alert. If our talks with the Lizards go as the civilian authorities hope, we’ll be moving forward to reclaim the occupied areas of the United States. And if they don’t, we’ll grab the Lizards by the snouts and kick ’em in the tail.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mutt said again. Patton sent a final steely-eyed glare over toward the Lizards, then jumped back into the command car. The driver started the motor. Acrid exhaust belched from the pipe. The big, clunky Dodge rolled away.

  Mutt let out a sigh of relief. He’d survived a lot of contact with the Lizards, and now he’d survived contact with his own top brass, too. As any front-line soldier would attest, your own generals could be at least as dangerous to you as the enemy.

  Liu Han listened with more than a little annoyance to the men of the central committee discussing how they would bring over to the side of the People’s Liberation Army the large number of peasants who flooded into Peking to work for the little scaly devils in the factories they kept open.

  The annoyance must have been visible; Hsia Shou-Tao stopped in the middle of his presentation on a new propaganda leaflet to remark, “I am sorry we seem to be boring you.”

  He didn’t sound sorry, except perhaps sorry she was there at all. He hadn’t displayed that kind of scornful arrogance since before he’d tried to rape her. Maybe the lesson he’d got then, like most lessons, wore off if it wasn’t repeated till it stuck.

  “Everything I have heard is very interesting to me,” Liu Han replied, “but do you think it really would catch the interest of a peasant with nothing more in his mind than filling his belly and the bellies of his children?”

  “This leaflet has been prepared by propaganda specialists,” Hsia said in condescending tones. “How do you presume to claim you know more than they?”

  “Because I was a peasant, not a propaganda specialist,” Liu Han retorted angrily. “If someone came up to me and started preaching like a Christian missionary about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the necessity of seizing the means of production, I wouldn’t have known what he was talking about, and I wouldn’t have wanted to learn, either. I think your propaganda specialists are members of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, out of touch with the true aspirations of the workers and especially of the peasants.”

  Hsia Shou-Tao stared at her. He had never taken her seriously, or he would not have tried to force himself upon her. He hadn’t noticed how well she’d picked up the jargon of the Communist Party; she relished turning that complex, artificial set of terms against those who had devised it.

  From across the table, Nieh Ho-T’ing asked her, “And how would you seek to make his propaganda more effective?” Liu Han weighed with great care the way her lover-who was also her instructor in Communist Party lore-spoke. Nieh was Hsia’s longtime comrade. Was he being sarcastic to her, supporting his friend?

  She decided he wasn’t, that the question was sincerely meant. She answered it on that assumption: “Don’t instruct new-come peasants in ideology. Most of them will not comprehend enough of what you are saying. Tell them instead that working for the little devils will hurt people. Tell them the things they help the scaly devils make will be used against their relatives who are still back in the villages. Tell them that if they do work for the scaly devils, they and their relatives will be liable to repisals. These are things they can understand. And when we firebomb a factory or murder workers coming out of one, they will see we speak the truth.”

  “They will not, however, be indoctrinated,” Hsia pointed out, so vehemently that Liu Han got the idea he’d written most of the leaflet she was criticizing.

  She looked across the table at him. “Yes? And so what? Most important is keeping the peasants from working for the little devils. If it is easier to keep them from doing that without indoctrinating them, then we shouldn’t bother trying. We do not have the resources to waste, do we?”

  Hsia stared at her, half in anger, half in amazement. Liu Han might have been an ignorant peasant a year before, but she wasn’t any more. Could others be quickly brought up to her level of political consciousness, though? She doubted that. She had seen the revolutionary movement from the inside, an opportunity most would never enjoy.

  Nieh said, “We can waste nothing. We are settling in for a long struggle, one that may last gen
erations. The little scaly devils wish to reduce us all to the level of ignorant peasants. This we cannot permit, so we must make the peasantry ideologically aware at some point in our program. Whether that point is the one under discussion, I admit, is a different question.”

  Hsia Shou-Tao looked as if he’d been stabbed. If even his old friend did not fully support him-“We shall revise as necessary,” he mumbled.

  “Good,” Liu Han said. “Very good, in fact. Thank you.” Once you’d won, you could afford to be gracious. But not too gracious: “When you have made the changes, please let me see them before they go to the printer.”

  “But-” Hsia looked ready to explode. But when he glanced around the table, he saw the other central committee members nodding. As far as they were concerned, Liu Han had proved her ability. Hsia snarled, “If I give you the text, will you be able to read it?”

  “I will read it,” she said equably. “I had better be able to read it, wouldn’t you say? The workers and peasants for whom it is intended will not be scholars, to know thousands of characters. The message must be strong and simple.”

  Heads again bobbed up and down along the table. Hsia Shou-Tao bowed his own head in surrender. His gaze remained black as a storm cloud, though. Liu Han regarded him thoughtfully. Trying to rape her had not been enough to get him purged even from the central committee, let alone from the Party. What about obstructionism? If he delayed or evaded giving her the revised wording for the leaflet, as he was likely to do, would that suffice?

  Part of her hoped Hsia would fulfill his duty as a revolutionary. The rest burned for a chance at revenge.

  Atvar paced back and forth in the chamber adapted-not quite well enough-to the needs of the Race. His tailstump quivered reflexively. Millions of years before, when the presapient ancestors of the Race had been long-tailed carnivores prowling across the plains of Home, that quiver had distracted prey from the other end, the end with the teeth. Would that the Big Uglies could have been so easily distracted!

  “I wish we could change our past,” he said.

  “Exalted Fleetlord?” The tone of Kirel’s interrogative cough said the shiplord of the conquest fleet’s bannership did not follow his train of thought.

  He explained: “Had we fought among ourselves more before the unified Empire formed, our weapons technology would have improved. When it came time to duplicate those antique weapons for conquests of other worlds, we would have had better arms. What was in our data banks served us well against the Rabotevs and Hallessi, and so we assumed it always would. Tosev 3 has been the crematorium of a great many of our assumptions.”

  “Truth-undeniable truth,” Kirel said. “But if our own internecine wars had continued longer and with better weapons, we might have exterminated ourselves rather than successfully unifying under the Emperors.” He cast his eyes down to the soft, intricately patterned woven floor covering.

  So did Atvar, who let out a long, mournful hissing sigh. “Only the madness of this world could make me explore might-have-beens.” He paced some more, the tip of his tailstump jerking back and forth. At last, he burst out, “Shiplord, are we doing the right thing in negotiating with the Big Uglies and for all practical purposes agreeing to withdraw from several of their not-empires? It violates all precedent, but then, the existence of opponents able to manufacture their own atomic weapons also violates all precedent.”

  “Exalted Fleetlord, I believe this to be the proper course, painful though it is,” Kirel said. “If we cannot conquer the entire surface of Tosev 3 without damaging great parts of it and having the Big Uglies damage still more, best we hold some areas and await the arrival of the colonization fleet. We gain the chance to reestablish ourselves securely and to prepare for the safe arrival of the colonists and the resources they bring.”

  “So I tell myself, over and over,” Atvar said. “I still have trouble being convinced. Seeing how the Tosevites have improved their own technology in the short time since we arrived here, I wonder how advanced they will be when the colonization Fleet finally reaches this world.”

  “Computer projections indicate we will retain a substantial lead,” Kirel said soothingly. “And the only other path open to us, it would appear, is the one Straha the traitor advocated: using our nuclear weapons in prodigal fashion to smash the Big Uglies into submission-which also, unfortunately, involves smashing the planetary surface.”

  “I no longer trust the computer projections,” Atvar said. “They have proved wrong too often; we do not know the Big Uglies well enough to model and extrapolate their behavior with any great hope of accuracy. The rest, however, is as you say, with the ironic proviso that the Tosevites care much less about the destruction of major portions of their world than we do. That has let them wage unlimited warfare against us, while we of necessity held back.”

  “ ‘Has let them’?” Kirel said. “ ‘Held back’? Am I to infer, Exalted Fleetlord, you purpose a change in policy?”

  “Not an active one, only reactive,” Atvar answered. “If the Deutsche, for example, carry out the threats their Leader has made through this von Ribbentrop creature and resume nuclear warfare against us, I shall do as I warned and thoroughly devastate Deutsch-held territory. That will teach whatever may be left of the Deutsche that we are not to be trifled with, and should have a salutary effect on the behavior of other Tosevite not-empires.”

  “So it should, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed. He was too tactful to remark on how closely the plan resembled the one Straha had advocated, for which the fleetlord silently thanked him. Instead, he continued, “I cannot imagine the Deutsch Tosevites taking such a risk in the face of our clear and unmistakable warnings, however.”

  “As a matter of fact, neither can I,” Atvar said. “But, with the Big Uglies, the only certain thing is uncertainty.”

  Heinrich Jager looked around with something approaching wonder. He could not see all the panzers and other armored lighting vehicles in his regiment, of course; they were concealed along the front on which they were to attack. But he’d never expected to come so close to establishment strength, never expected to be so fully loaded with both petrol and ammunition.

  He leaned out of the cupola of his Panther and nodded to Otto Skorzeny. “I wish we weren’t doing this, but if we do it, we’ll do it well.”

  “Spoken like a soldier,” said an SS man standing near Skorzeny. The boys in the black shirts had drifted back up to the front line over the past few days. If Lizard Intelligence was up to keeping track of their movements, Jager would be feeding his regiment into a sausage machine. He didn’t think the Lizards were that smart, and hoped he was right. The SS man went on, “It is every officer’s duty, just as it is that of every soldier, to obey the commands of his superiors and of theFuhrer without question, regardless of his personal feelings.”

  Jager stared down at the jackbooted ignoramus in silent scorn. Take his words to the logical extreme and you’d turn theWehrmacht into a bunch of automata as inflexible as the Russians or the Lizards. If you got orders that made no sense, you questioned them. If they still didn’t make sense, or if they led you into an obvious catastrophe, you ignored them.

  You needed guts to do it. You put your career on the line when you disobeyed orders. But if you could convince your superiors you’d been right, or that the orders you’d got showed no real understanding of the situation in front of you, you’d survive. You might even get promoted.

  Jager, now, hadn’t just disobeyed orders. If you wanted to look at things in a particular light, he’d given aid and comfort to the enemy. Any SS man who found out about what he’d done would look at it in that particular light.

  For his part, he studied the weedy little fellow standing there beside Skorzeny. Had he dropped his pants and enjoyed himself with Karol’s wife, or maybe with his young daughter, while a couple of others held her down? Was he the one who’d carved SS runes into the Polish farmer’s belly? And what, in his agony, had Karol said? Was this smiling chap just w
aiting for the bomb to go off before he arrested Jager and started carving runes into him?

  Skorzeny glanced down at his wristwatch. “Soon now,” he said. “When it goes up, we move, and the signal goes out to our armies on the other fronts, too. The Lizards will be sorry they didn’t give in to our demands.”

  “Yes, and what happens afterwards?” Jager asked as he had before, still hoping he could talk Skorzeny out of pushing the fateful button. “We can be sure the Lizards will destroy at least one city of the GermanReich. They’ve done that every time anyone used an explosive-metal bomb against them in war. But this isn’t just war-it’s breaking a cease-fire. Aren’t they liable to do something worse?”

  “I don’t know,” Skorzeny said cheerfully. “And you know what else? I don’t give a fuck, either. We’ve been over this ground already. The job theFuhrer’s given me is kicking the Lizards and the Jews in the balls, just as hard as I can. That’s what I’m going to do, too. Whatever happens afterwards, it damn well happens, that’s all, and I’ll worry about it then.”

  “That is the National Socialist way of thought,” the other SS man declared, beaming at Skorzeny.

  Skorzeny wasn’t looking back on him. TheStandartenfuhrer’s eyes were on Jager instead, up there in the cupola (the engineers and mechanics had been right-it was a vastly improved cupola) of the Panther. Without giving his black-shirted colleague a hint of what he was thinking, he made his opinion plain to the panzer colonel. If it wasn’t,What a load of pious crap, Jager would have eaten his service cap.

  And yet, even if Skorzeny didn’t give a damn about the slogans under which he fought, they remained valid for him. Hitler flew him like a falcon at chosen foes. And, like a falcon, he didn’t worry about where he was flying or for what reasons, only about how to strike the hardest blow when he got there.

  That wasn’t enough.

  Jager had fought the same way himself, till he’d had his eyes forcibly opened to what Germany had done to the Jews in the lands it had overrun, and to what it would have done had the arrival of the Lizards not interrupted things. Once your eyes were opened, shutting them again wasn’t easy. Jager had tried, and failed.