Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  But the blackshirts hadn’t They hadn’t thought to paw through the kit and see what was inside. He blessed them for their inefficiency.

  He took out the syringes. “Antidote,” he told Ludmila. “Hold still.” All at once, speaking was an effort for him, too: the nerve gas was having its way. A few more minutes and he would have quietly keeled over and died, without ever figuring out why he was dead.

  Ludmila, for a wonder, didn’t argue. Maybe she was having trouble talking and breathing, too. He jabbed the syringe into the meat other thigh, as he’d been trained, and pressed down on the plunger.

  He grabbed another syringe. “You,” he told Anielewicz as he yanked off its protective cap. The Jewish fighting leader nodded. Jager hurried to inject him; he was starting to turn blue. If your lungs didn’t work and your heart didn’t work, that was what happened to you.

  Jager threw down the second syringe. Its glass body shattered on the pavement He heard that, but had trouble seeing it. Working as much by touch as by sight, he got out another syringe and stabbed himself in the leg.

  He felt as if he’d held a live electrical wire against his flesh. It wasn’t well-being that rushed through him; instead, he was being poisoned in a different way, one that fought the action of the nerve gas. His mouth went dry. His heart pounded so loud, he had no trouble hearing it. And the street, which had gone dim and faint as the nerve gas squeezed his pupils shut, all at once seemed blindingly bright. He blinked. Tears filled his eyes.

  To escape the hideous glare, he ducked inside the factory. There, in real shadows, the light seemed more tolerable. Mordechai Anielewicz and Ludmila followed. “What was that stuff you shot us with?” the Jew asked, his voice a whisper.

  “The antidote for nerve gas-that’s all I know,” Jager answered. “They issued it to us in case we had to cross areas we’d already saturated while we were fighting the Lizards-or in case the wind shifted when we didn’t expect it to. Skorzeny must have brought along gas grenades, or maybe just bottles full of gas, for all I know. Throw one in, let it break, give yourself a shot while you’re waiting, and then go in and do what you were going to do.”

  Anielewicz looked down at the dead body of the sentry. “We have nerve gas now, too, you know,” he said. Jager nodded. Anielewicz scowled. “We’re going to have to be even more careful with it than we have been-and we’ve taken casualties from it.” Jager nodded again. With nerve gas, you couldn’t be too careful.

  “Enough of this,” Ludmila said. “Where is the bomb, and how do we get to it and stop Skorzeny without getting killed ourselves?”

  Those were good questions. Jager couldn’t have come up with better if he’d thought for a week, and he didn’t have a week to waste thinking. He glanced over to Anielewicz. If anybody had the answers, the Jewish fighting leader did.

  Anielewicz pointed into the bowels of the building. “The bomb is there, less than a hundred meters away. See the opening there, behind the overturned desk? The path isn’t straight, but it’s clear. One of you, maybe both of you, should go down it. It’s the only way you’ll get there fast enough to be useful. Me, I set this place up. There’s another way to get to the bomb. I’ll take that-and we see what happens then.”

  Jager was used to sending others out to create distractions for him to exploit. Now he and Ludmila were the distraction. He couldn’t argue with that, not when Anielewicz knew the ground and he didn’t. But he knew the people who created distractions were the ones likely to get expended when the shooting started. If his mouth hadn’t already been dry from the antidote, it would have gone that way.

  Anielewicz didn’t wait for him and Ludmila to argue. Like any good commander, he took being obeyed for granted. Pointing one last time to the upside-down desk, he slipped away behind a pile of rubble.

  “Stay in back of me,” Jager whispered to Ludmila.

  “Chivalry is reactionary,” she said. “You have the better weapon. I should lead and draw fire.” In strictly military terms, she was right He’d never thought strictly military terms would apply to the woman he loved. But if he failed here out of love or chivalry or whatever you wanted to call it, he failed altogether. Reluctantly, he waved Ludmila ahead.

  She didn’t see the motion, because she’d already started moving forward. He followed, close as he could. As Anielewicz had said, the path wound but was easy enough to use. With his pupils dilated by the nerve gas antidote, he could see exactly where to place each foot to make the least possible noise.

  What he thought was about halfway to the bomb, Ludmila stopped in her tracks. She pointed round the corner. Jager came up far enough to see. A Jewish guard lay dead there, one hand still on his rifle. Ever so carefully, Jager and Ludmila stepped over him and moved on.

  Up ahead, Jager heard tools clinking on metal, a sound with which he’d become intimately familiar while serving on panzers. Normally, that was a good sound, promising that something broken would soon be fixed. Something broken would soon be fixed now, too. Here, though, the sound of ongoing repair raised the hair at the back of his neck.

  He made a mistake then-brushing against some rubble, he knocked over a brick. It fell to the ground with a crash that seemed hideously loud. Jager froze, cursing himself.That’s why you didn’t stay in the infantry, you clumsy son of a whore.

  He prayed Skorzeny hadn’t heard the brick. God wasn’t listening. The handicraft noises stopped. A burst of submachine gun fire came in their place. Skorzeny couldn’t see him, but didn’t care. He was hoping ricochets would do the job for him. They almost did. A couple of bouncing bullets came wickedly close to Jager as he threw himself flat.

  “Give up, Skorzeny!” he shouted, wriggling forward with Ludmila beside him. “You’re surrounded!”

  “Jager?” For one of the rare times in their acquaintance, he heard Skorzeny astonished. “What are you doing here, you kikeloving motherfucker? I thought I put paid to you for good. They should have hanged you from a noose made of piano wire by now. Well, they will. One day they will.” He fired another long burst. He wasn’t worried about spending ammunition. Bullets whined around Jager, striking sparks as they caromed off bricks and wrecked machines.

  Jager scuttled toward him anyhow. If he made it to the next heap of bricks, he could pop up over it and get a decent shot. “Give up!” he yelled again. “We’ll let you go if you do.”

  “You’ll be too dead to worry about it, whether I give up or not,” the SS man answered. Then he paused again. “No, maybe not. You should be dead already, as a matter of fact. Why the hell aren’t you?” Now he sounded friendly, interested, as if they were hashing it out over a couple of shots of schnapps.

  “Antidote,” Jager told him.

  “Isn’t that a kick in the balls?” Skorzeny said. “Well, I’d hoped I’d get out of here in one piece, but-” Thebut was punctuated by a potato-masher hand grenade that spun hissing through the air and landed five or six meters behind Jager and Ludmila.

  He grabbed her and folded both of them into a tight ball an instant before the grenade exploded. The blast was deafening. Hot fragments of casing bit into his back and legs. He grabbed for his Schmeisser, sure Skorzeny would be following hard on the heels of the grenade.

  A rifle shot rang out, then another one. Skorzeny’s submachine gun chattered in reply. The bullets weren’t aimed at Jager. He and Ludmila untangled themselves from each other and both rushed to that pile of bricks.

  Skorzeny stood swaying like a tree in the breeze. In the gloom, his eyes were enormous, and all pupil: he’d given himself a stiff dose of nerve-gas antidote. Right in the center of the ragged old shirt he wore was a spreading red stain. He brought up his Schmeisser, but for once didn’t seem sure what to do with it, whether to aim at Anielewicz or at Jager and Ludmila.

  His foes had no such hesitation. Anielewicz’s rifle and Ludmila’s pistol cracked at the same instant in which Jager squeezed off a burst. More red flowers blossomed on Skorzeny’s body. The breeze in which he swayed became a gal
e. It blew him over. The submachine gun fell from his hands. His fingers groped toward it, pulling hand and arm after them as they struggled from one rough piece of ground to the next, a centimeter and a half farther on. Jager fired another burst. Skorzeny twitched as the bullets slammed into him, and at last lay still.

  Only then did Jager notice the SS man had pried several planks off the big crate that held the explosive-metal bomb. Under them, the aluminum skin of the device lay exposed, like that of a surgical patient revealed by an opening in the drapes. If Skorzeny had already set the detonator in there-

  Jager ran toward the bomb. He got there a split second ahead of Anielewicz, who was in turn a split second ahead of Ludmila. Skorzeny had removed one of the panels from the skin. Jager peered into the hole thus exposed. With his pupils so dilated, he had no trouble seeing the hole was empty.

  Anielewicz pointed to a cylinder a few centimeters in front of his left foot “That’s the detonator,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s the one we pulled or if he brought it with him, the way you said he might. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he didn’t get to use it.”

  “We won.” Ludmila sounded dazed, as if she was fully realizing for the first time what they’d done, what they’d prevented.

  “Nobody will put the detonator in this bomb any time soon,” Anielewicz said. “Nobody will be able to get close to it and keep living, not for a while, not without the antidote, whatever that is. How long does the gas persist, Jager? You know more about it than anyone else around here.”

  “It’s not exposed to bright sun. What’s left of the roof will keep rain off. It should last a good while. Days, certainly. Weeks, maybe,” Jager answered. He still felt keyed up, ready to fight. Maybe that was the aftermath of battle. Maybe, too, it was the antidote driving him. Anything that made his heart thump like that probably scrambled his brains, too.

  “Can we go out of here now?” Ludmila asked. She looked frightened; the antidote might have been turning her to flight, not fight.

  “We’d better get out of here, I’d say,” Anielewicz added. “God only knows how much of that gas we’re taking in every time we breathe. If there’s more of it than the antidote can handle-”

  “Yes,” Jager said, starting toward the street. “And when we do get out, we have to burn these clothes. We have to do it ourselves, and we have to bathe and bathe and bathe. You don’t need to breathe this gas for it to kill you. If it touches your skin, that will do the job-slower than breathing it, but just about as sure. We’re dangerous to anyone around us till we decontaminate.”

  “Lovely stuff you Germans turn out,” Anielewicz said from behind him.

  “The Lizards didn’t like it,” Jager answered. The Jewish fighting leader grunted and shut up.

  The closer Jager got to the street, the brighter the glare became, till he squeezed his eyes almost shut and peered through a tiny crack between upper and lower lids. He wondered how long his pupils would stay dilated and then, relentlessly pragmatic, wondered where in Lodz he could come up with a pair of sunglasses.

  He strode past the outermost dead Jewish sentry, then out onto the street, which seemed to him awash in as much brilliance as if the explosive-metal bomb had gone off. The Jews probably would have to cordon off a couple of blocks around the wrecked factory on one pretext or another, just to keep people from inadvertently poisoning themselves as they walked by.

  Ludmila emerged and stood beside him. Through his half-blind squint, he saw hers. He didn’t know what was going to happen next He didn’t even know whether, as Anielewicz had suggested, they’d ended up breathing more nerve gas than their antidote could handle. If the day started going dim instead of brilliant, he still had two syringes left in his aid kit. For three people, that made two-thirds of a shot apiece. Would he need it? If he did, would it be enough?

  He did know what wouldn’t happen next. Lodz wouldn’t go up in a fireball like a new sun. The Lizards wouldn’t aim their concentrated wrath at Germany-not on account of that, anyhow. He wouldn’t go back to theWehrmacht, nor Ludmila to the Red Air Force. Whatever future they had, whether hours or decades, was here.

  He smiled at her. Her eyes were almost closed, but she saw him and smiled back. He saw that, very clearly.

  Atvar had heard the buzzing racket of Tosevite aircraft a great many times through sound recordings, but only rarely in person. He turned one eye turret toward the window of his suite. Sure enough, he could see the clumsy, yellow-painted machine climbing slowly into the sky. “That is the last of them, is it not?” he said.

  “Yes, Exalted Fleetlord, that one bears away Marshall, the negotiator from the not-empire of the United States,” Zolraag replied.

  “The talks are complete,” Atvar said, sounding disbelieving even to himself. “We are at peace with large portions of Tosev 3.”No wonder I sound disbelieving, he thought.We have peace here, but peace without conquest. Who would have imagined that when we set out from Home?

  “Now we await the arrival of the colonization fleet, Exalted Fleetlord,” Zolraag said. “With its coming, with the permanent establishment of the Race on Tosev 3, begins the incorporation of this whole world into the Empire. It will be slower and more difficult than we anticipated before we came here, but it shall be done.”

  “That is also my view, and why I agreed to halt large-scale hostilities for the time being,” Atvar said. He turned one eye turret toward Moishe Russie, who still stood watching the Big Ugly aircraft shrink in the distance. To Zolraag, he went on, “Translate for him what you just said, and ask his opinion on the matter.”

  “It shall be done,” Zolraag said before shifting from the language of the Race to the ugly, guttural grunts he used when speaking to the Tosevite.

  Russie made more grunts by way of reply. Zolraag turned them into words a person could understand: “His answer is not altogether germane, Exalted Fleetlord. He expresses relief that the negotiator from Deutschland departed without embroiling the Race and the Tosevites in fresh warfare.”

  “I confess to a certain amount of relief on this score myself,” Atvar said. “After that pompous pronouncement the Big Ugly issued which proved to be either a bluff or a spectacular example of Deutsch incompetence-our analysis there is still incomplete-I did indeed anticipate renewed combat. But the Tosevites apparently decided to be rational instead.”

  Zolraag translated for Russie, whose reply made his mouth fall open in amusement. “He says expecting the Deutsche to be rational is like expecting good weather in the middle of winter: you may get it, yes, for a day or two, but most of the time you will be disappointed.”

  “Expect anything from either Tosevites or Tosevite weather and most of the time you will be disappointed-though you need not translate that,” the fleetlord answered. Russie was looking at him with what he thought was alertness; he remembered the Big Ugly did know some of the language of the Race. Atvar shrugged mentally; Russie already had a good notion of his opinion of Tosevites. He said, “Tell him that, sooner or later, his people will be subjects of the Emperor.”

  Zolraag dutifully told him. Russie did not answer, not directly. Instead, he went back to the window and stared out once more. Atvar felt only annoyance: the Tosevite aircraft was long gone by now. But Russie still kept looking out through the glass without saying anything.

  “What is he doing?” Atvar snapped at last, patience deserting him.

  Zolraag put the question. Through him, Moishe Russie replied, “I am looking across the Nile at the Pyramids.”

  “Why?” Atvar said, irritated still. “What do you care about these-what were they? — these large funerary monuments, is that it? They are massive, yes, but barbarous even by Tosevite standards.”

  “My ancestors were slaves in this country three, maybe four thousand years ago,” Russie told him. “Maybe they helped build the Pyramids. That’s what our legends say, though I don’t know if it’s true. Who cares about the ancient Egyptians now? They were mighty, but they are gone. We
Jews were slaves, but we’re still here. How can you know what will happen from what is now?”

  Now Atvar’s mouth fell open. “Tosevite pretensions to antiquity always make me laugh,” he said to Zolraag. “Hear how the Big Ugly speaks of three or four thousand years-six or eight thousand of ours-as if it were a long time in historic terms. We had already absorbed both the Rabotevs and the Hallessi by then, and some of us were beginning to think about the planets of the star Tosev: day before yesterday, in the history of the Race.”

  “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Zolraag said.

  “Of course it is truth,” Atvar said, “and it is why in the end we shall triumph, our setbacks because of the Big Uglies’ unexpected technological sophistication notwithstanding. We are content to progress one small step at a time. There are whole Tosevite civilizations, as Russie just said, which moved forward at the usual Big Ugly breakneck clip-and then failed utterly. We do not have this difficulty, nor shall we ever. We are established, even if on only part of the world. With the arrival of the colonization fleet, our presence shall become unassailably permanent. We then have only to wait for another Tosevite cultural collapse, extend our influence over the area where it occurs, and repeat the process until no section of the planet remains outside the Empire’s control.”

  “Truth,” Zolraag repeated. “Because of Tosevite surprises, the conquest fleet might not have accomplished quite everything the plan back on Home called for.” Kirel could not have been more cautious and diplomatic than that. Zolraag continued, “The conquest, however, does go on, just as you said. What, in the end, does it matter if it takes generations rather than days?”

  “In the end, it matters not at all,” Atvar replied. “History is on our side.”

  Vyacheslav Molotov coughed. The last T-34 had rumbled through Red Square a good while before, but the air was still thick with diesel fumes. If Stalin noticed them, he gave no sign. He chuckled in high good humor. “Well, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, it wasn’t quite a victory parade, not the sort I would have wanted after we’d finished crushing the Hitlerites, for instance, but it will do, it will do.”