Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yes, and that wasn’t easy, either,” Anielewicz said, wiping his forehead with a sleeve to show how hard it was. “We pulled the detonator, too-not just the wireless switch, but the manual device-so Skorzeny can’t set it off even if he finds it and even if he gets to it.”

  Jager held up a warning hand. “Don’t bet your life on that. He may come up with the detonator you yanked, or he may have one of his own. You never want to underestimate what he can do. Don’t forget: I’ve helped him do it”

  “If he has only a detonator for use by the hand,” Ludmila said in her slow German, “would he not be blowing himself up along with everything else? If he had to, would he do that?”

  “Good question.” Anielewicz looked from her to Jager. “You know him best.” He made that an accusation.“Nu? Would he?”

  “I know two things,” Jager answered. “First one is, he’s liable to have some sort of scheme for setting it off by hand and escaping anyhow-no, I have no idea what, but he may. Second one is, you didn’t just make him angry, you made him furious when his nerve-gas bomb didn’t go off. He owes you one for that. And he has his orders. And, whatever else you can say about him, he’s a brave man. If the only way he can set it off is to blow himself up with it, he’s liable to be willing to do that.”

  Mordechai Anielewicz nodded, looking unhappy. “I was afraid you were going to say that. People who will martyr themselves for their cause are much harder to deal with than the ones who just want to live for it.” His chuckle held little humor. “The Lizards complain too many people are willing to become martyrs. Now I know how they feel.”

  “What will you do with us now that we are here?” Ludmila asked.

  “That is another good question,” said the woman-Bertha-sitting by Anielewicz. She turned to him, fondly; Jager wondered if they were married. She wore no ring, whatever that meant. “What shall we do with them?”

  “Jager is a soldier, and a good one, and he knows Skorzeny and the way his mind works,” the Jewish fighting leader said. “If he had not been reliable before, he would not be here now. Him we will give a weapon and let him help us guard the bomb.”

  “And what of me?” Ludmila demanded indignantly; Jager could have guessed she was going to do that. Her hand came to rest on the butt of her automatic pistol. “I am a soldier. Ask Heinrich. Ask the Nazis. Ask the Lizards.”

  Anielewicz held up a placatory hand. “I believe all this,” he answered, “but first things first.” Yes, he was a good officer, not that Jager found that news. He knew how to set priorities. He also knew how to laugh, which he did now. “And you will probably shoot me if I try to separate you from Colonel Jager here. So. All rightWehrmacht, Red Air Force, a bunch of crazy Jews-we are all in this together, right?”

  “Together,” Jager agreed. “Together we save Lodz, or together we go up in smoke. That’s about how it is.”

  A male shook Ussmak. “Get up, headmale! You must get up,” Oyyag said urgently, adding an emphatic cough. “That is the signal for rousing. If you do not present yourself, you will be punished. The whole barracks will be punished because of your failing.”

  Ever so slowly, Ussmak began to move. Among the Race, superiors were supposed to be responsible for inferiors and to look out for their interests. So it had been for millennia uncounted. So, on Home, it no doubt continued to be. Here on Tosev 3, Ussmak was an outlaw. That weakened his bonds of cohesion to the group, though some of them were mutineers, too. Even more to the point, he was a starved, exhausted outlaw. When you were less than convinced your own life would long continue-when you were less than convinced you wanted it to continue-group solidarity came hard.

  He managed to drag himself to his feet and lurch outside for the morning inspection. The Tosevite guards, who probably could not have stated their correct number of thumbs twice running without luck on their side, had to count the males of the Race four times before they were satisfied no one had grown wings and flown away during the night. Then they let them go in to breakfast.

  It was meager, even by the miserable standards of the prison camp. Ussmak did not finish even his own small portion. “Eat,” Oyyag urged him. “How can you get through another day’s work if you do not eat?”

  Ussmak had his own counterquestion. “How can I get through another day’s work even if I do eat? Anyhow, I am not hungry.”

  That set the other male hissing in alarm. “Headmale, you must report to the Big Ugly physicians. Perhaps they can give you something to improve your appetite, to improve your condition.”

  Ussmak’s mouth fell open. “A new body, perhaps? A new spirit?”

  “You cannot eat?” Oyyag said. Ussmak’s weary gesture showed he could not. His companion in misery, who was every bit as thin as he was, hesitated, but not for long. “May I consume your portion, then?” When Ussmak did not at once say no, the other male gulped down the food.

  As if in a dream, Ussmak shambled out to the forest with his work gang. He drew an axe and went slowly to work hacking down a tree with pale bark. He chopped at it with all his strength, but made little progress. “Work harder, you,” the Tosevite guard watching him snapped in the Russki language.

  “It shall be done,” Ussmak answered. He did some more chopping, with results equally unsatisfactory to the guard. When he first came to the camp, that would have left him quivering with fear. Now it rolled off his skinny flanks. They had put him here. Try as they would, how could they do worse?

  He shambled back to camp for lunch. Worn as he was, he could eat little. Again, someone quickly disposed of his leftovers. When, too soon, it was time to return to the forest, he stumbled and fell and had trouble getting up again. Another male aided him, half guiding, half pushing him out toward the Tosevite trees.

  He took up his axe and went back to work on the pale-barked tree. Try as he would, he could not make the blade take more than timid nips at the trunk. He was too weak and too apathetic for anything more. If he did not chop it down, if the work gang did not saw it into the right lengths of wood, they would fall short of their norm and would get only penalty rations.So what? Ussmak thought. He hadn’t been able to eat a regular ration, so why should he care if he got less?

  All the other males would get less, too, of course. He could not care about that, either. A proper male of the Race would have; he knew as much. But he’d begun to get detached from the rest of the Race when a Tosevite sniper killed Votal, his first landcruiser commander. Ginger had made things worse. Then he’d lost another good landcruiser crew, and then he’d led the mutiny for which he’d had such hope. And the results of that had been… this. No, he was no proper male, no longer.

  He was so tired. He set down the axe.I’ll rest for a moment, he thought.

  “Work!” a guard shouted.

  “Gavno?”Ussmak said, adding an interrogative cough. Grudgingly, the Big Ugly swung aside the muzzle of his weapon and bobbed his head up and down to grant permission. The guards let you evacuate your bowels-most of the time. It was one of the few things they did let you do.

  Stumbling slowly away from the tree, Ussmak went behind a screen of bushes. He squatted to relieve himself. Nothing happened-not surprising, not when he was so empty inside. He tried to rise, but instead toppled over onto his side. He took a breath. A little later, he took another. Quite a bit later, he took one more.

  Of themselves, the nictitating membranes slid across his eyes. His eyelids drooped, closed. In those last moments, he wondered if Emperors past would accept his spirit in spite of all he had done. Soon, he found out what he would find out.

  When the Lizard didn’t come out of the bushes after taking a shit, Yuri Andreyevich Palchinsky went in after it. He had to scuffle around to find it, and it would not come out when he called. “Stinking thing will pay,” he muttered.

  Then he did find it, by tripping over it and almost falling on his face. He cursed and drew back his foot to give it a good kick, but didn’t. Why bother? The damn thing was already dead.

&nbs
p; He picked it up, slung it over his shoulder-it didn’t weigh anything to speak of-and carried it back toward the camp. Off to one side was a trench in which to toss the ones who starved or worked themselves to death this week. In went the latest body, on top of a lot of others.

  “We’re liable to fill this one up before it’s time to dig next week’s,” Palchinsky muttered. He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. The work gang was. He turned his back on the mass grave and headed out to the woods.

  “We have shown we can be merciful,” Liu Han declared. “We have let one little scaly devil go back to his kind in spite of his crimes against the workers and peasants.”I have let him go in spite of his crimes against me, she added to herself.Let no one say now that I cannot put the interests of the Party, the interests of the People’s Liberation Army, above my own. “In a few days, the truce to which we agreed with the scaly devils expires. They still refuse to make us party to the larger cease-fire. We shall show them we can be strong as dragons, too. They will become sorry enough to make concessions.”

  She sat down. The men of the Peking central committee put their heads together, discussing what she had said and how she said it. Nieh Ho-T’ing murmured something to a newcomer, a handsome, plump-cheeked man whose name she hadn’t caught. The man nodded. He sent Liu Han an admiring glance. She wondered if he was admiring her words or her body. She stared back steadily, measuring him with her eyes.Country bumpkin, she decided, forgetting for a moment how recently she had been a peasant with no politics whatever.

  Sitting on Nieh’s other side was Hsia Shou-Tao. He got to his feet. Liu Han had been sure he would. If she said the Yangtze flowed from west to east, he would disagree because she had said it.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing raised a warning finger, but Hsia plunged ahead anyhow: “Zeal is important to the revolutionary cause, but so is caution. Through too much aggressiveness, we are liable to force the little devils into strong responses against us. A campaign of low-level harassment strikes me as a better plan, one more likely to yield the results we desire, than going at once from truce to all-out war.”

  Hsia looked around the room to see what sort of reaction he’d received. Several men were nodding, but others, among them four or five upon whom he’d counted, sat silent and stony. Liu Han smiled inside while keeping her own features impassive. As was her way, she’d prepared this ground before she began to fight on it. Had Hsia Shou-Tao an ounce of sense, he would have realized that beforehand. Learning of it now, the hard way, made his face take on almost the rictus of agony it had worn when Liu Han kneed him in the private parts.

  To her surprise, the bumpkinish fellow by Nieh Ho-T’ing spoke up: “While war and politics cannot be divorced for a single instant, still it is sometimes necessary to remind the foe that power springs ultimately from the barrel of a gun. The little scaly devils, in my view, must be forcibly shown that their occupation is temporary and shall in the end surely fail. Thus, as Comrade Liu has so ably stated, we shall strike them a series of hard blows the instant the truce expires, gauging our subsequent actions on their response.”

  He didn’t talk like a bumpkin; be talked like an educated man, perhaps even a poet. And now, up and down the table, heads bobbed in approval of his words. Liu Han saw more was involved there than how well he’d spoken: he had authority here, authority everyone acknowledged without question. She wished she’d learned what his name was.

  “As usual, Mao Tse-Tung analyzes clearly,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “His viewpoint is most reasonable, and we shall carry out our program against the little scaly devils as he directs.”

  Again, the members of the Peking central committee nodded as if a single puppeteer controlled all their heads. Liu Han nodded along with everyone else. Her eyes were wide with amazement, though, as she stared at the man who headed the revolutionary cause throughout China. Mao Tse-Tung had thought well of somethingshe said?

  He looked back at her, beaming like Ho Tei, the fat little god of luck in whom proper Communists did not believe but whom Liu Han had trouble dismissing from her mind. Yes, he’d approved of her words. His face said that clearly. And yes, he was looking at her as a man looks at a woman: not crudely, as Hsia Shou-Tao did when he all but spread her legs with his eyes, but unmistakably all the same.

  She wondered what she ought to do about that. She’d already had doubts about her attachment to Nieh Ho-T’ing, doubts both ideological and personal. She was a little surprised to note Mao’s interest; a lot of the central committee members, probably most of them, lusted after revolution more than after women. Hsia was a horrible example of why that rule worked well. But Mao was surely a special case.

  She’d heard he was married. Even if he did want her, even if he did bed her, she was certain he wouldn’t leave his wife for her: some sort of actress, if she remembered rightly. How much influence could she gain as a mistress, and was that enough to make the offer of her body worthwhile? Had she felt no spark, she wouldn’t have considered the notion for an instant; thanks to the scaly devils, she’d had far too much of coupling with men she did not want. But she’d thought Mao attractive before she had any idea who he was.

  She smiled at him, just a little. He smiled, too, politely. Nieh Ho-T’ing noticed nothing. He tended to be blind that way; she sometimes thought she was more a convenience for him than a proper lover. The foreign devil Bobby Fiore had shown far more consideration for her as a person.

  What to do, then? Part of that, of course, depended on Mao. But Liu Han, with a woman’s ancient wisdom, knew that. If she showed herself to be interested, he would probably lie down beside her.

  Did she want to do that? Hard to be sure. Would the benefits outweigh the risks and annoyances? She didn’t have to decide right away. The Communists thought in terms of years, five-year plans, decades of struggle. The little scaly devils, she’d learned, thought in decades, centuries, millennia. She hated the little devils, but they were too powerful to be dismissed as stupid. Viewed from their perspective, or even that of the Party, leaping ahead with a seduction before you worked out the consequences was foolish, nothing else but.

  She smiled at Mao again. It might well not matter, anyhow, not today. Who could guess how long he’d be here? She’d never seen him in Peking before, and might not see him again any time soon. But he likely would come back: that only stood to reason. When he did, she wanted him to remember her. By then, wheneverthen was, she would have made up her mind. She had plenty of time. And, whichever way she decided, the choice would behers.

  Mordechai Anielewicz had played a lot of cat-and-mouse games since the Nazis invaded Poland to open the Second World War. In every one of them, though, against the Germans, against the Lizards, against what Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski thought of as the legitimate Jewish administration of Lodz, playing the Germans and Lizards off against each other, he’d been the mouse, operating against larger, more powerful foes.

  Now he was the cat, and finding he didn’t much care for the role. Somewhere out there, Otto Skorzeny was lurking. He didn’t know where. He didn’t know how much Skorzeny knew. He didn’t know what the SS man was planning. He didn’t like the feeling one bit.

  “If you were Skorzeny, what would you do?” he asked Heinrich Jager. Jager was, after all, not only a German but a man who’d worked closely with the commando extraordinaire. Asking a German felt odd, anyhow. Intellectually, he knew Jager was no Jew-butcher. Emotionally…

  The panzer colonel scratched his head, “If I were in charge instead of Skorzeny, I’d lie low till I knew enough to strike, then hit quick and hard.” He chuckled wryly. “But whether that’s what he’ll do, I couldn’t begin to tell you. He has his own way of getting things done. Sometimes I think he’s daft-till he brings it off.”

  “Nobody’s set eyes on him since I did,” Anielewicz said, frowning. “He might have fallen off the face of the earth-though that’d be too much to ask for, wouldn’t it? Maybe be is lying low.”

  “He can’t do that for too long, though,”
Jager pointed out. “If he finds out where the bomb is, he’ll try to set it off. It’s late already, of course, and a major attack hinges on it. He won’t wait.”

  “We’ve taken out the detonator,” Mordechai said. “It’s not in the bomb any more, though we can get it to the bomb in a hurry if we have to.”

  Jager shrugged. “That shouldn’t matter. If Skorzeny didn’t bring another one, he’s a fool-and a fool he’s not. Besides which, he’s an engineer; he’d know how to install it.” An engineering student himself, Anielewicz grimaced. He wanted nothing in common with the SS man.

  Ludmila Gorbunova asked, “Will he have men he can recruit here in Lodz, or is he all alone in this city?”

  Anielewicz looked to Jager. Jager shrugged again. “This town was under the rule of theReich for some time before the Lizards came. Are there still Germans here?”

  “From the days when it was Litzmannstadt, you mean?” Mordechai asked, and shook his head without waiting for an answer. “No, after the Lizards came, we made most of the Aryan colonists pack up and go. The Poles did the same thing with them. And do you know what? We don’t miss the Germans a bit, either.”

  Jager looked at him steadily. Anielewicz felt himself flushing. If any man alive was entitled to score points off a German soldier, he was.A German soldier, yes, but notthis German soldier. If it hadn’t been forthis German soldier, he wouldn’t be hereto score points. He had to remember that, no matter how hard it was.

  “Not many Germans, eh?” Jager said matter-of-factly. “If any are left, Skorzeny will find them. And he’ll probably have connections among the Poles. They don’t like you Jews, either.”

  Was he trying to score points, too? Mordechai couldn’t be sure. Even if he was, that didn’t make him wrong. Ludmila said, “But the Poles. If they help Skorzeny, they’ll be blowing themselves up, too.”

  “You know that,” Jager said. “I know that. But the Poles don’t necessarily know it. If Skorzeny says, ‘Here, I have a big bomb hidden that will blow up all the Jews but not you,’ they’re liable to believe him.”