Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Nieh smiled.

  Razor wire. Huts. Cots. Cabbage. Beets. Potatoes. Black bread. The Lizards no doubt intended it to be a prison camp to break a man’s spirit. After the privations of the Warsaw ghetto, it felt more like a holiday resort to Mordechai Anielewicz. As gaolers, the Lizards were amateurs. The food, for instance, was plain and boring, but the Lizards didn’t seem to have thought of cutting back the quantity.

  Mordechai felt on holiday for another reason as well. He’d been a leader of fighting men for a long time: of Jews against Nazis, of Jews for the Lizards. Then he’d been a fugitive, and then a simple partisan. Now the other shoe had dropped: he was a prisoner, and didn’t need to worry about getting captured.

  In their own way, the Lizards were humane. When the Germans captured partisans, they shot them without further ado-or sometimes with further ado, if they felt like trying to squeeze out information before granting the grace of a bullet. But the Lizards had taken him and Jerzy and Friedrich across Poland to a POW camp outside Piotrkow, south of Lodz.

  No one here had the slightest idea who he was. He answered to Shmuel, not to his own name. As far as Friedrich and Jerzy knew, he was just a Jew who’d fought in their band. Nobody asked a would-be partisan probing questions about his past. Even in the camp, the freedom of anonymity was exhilarating.

  One morning after roll call, a Lizard guard official read from a list: “The following Tosevites will fall out for interrogation-” His Polish was bad, and what he did to the pronunciation of Anielewicz’s alias a caution.

  Nonetheless, Mordechai fell out without a qualm. They’d already interrogated him two or three times. To them, interrogation meant nothing worse than asking questions. They knew about torture, but the idea appalled them. There were times when Anielewicz savored the irony of that. They hadn’t even questioned him particularly hard. To them, he was just another Big Ugly caught with a rifle in his hands.

  He started to sweat as soon as he went into the wooden shed the Lizards used for their camp headquarters. That had nothing to do with fear; the Lizards heated their buildings to their own comfort level, which felt to him like the Sahara.

  “You, Shmuel, you go to room two on the left,” one of his guards said in execrable Yiddish.

  Mordechai obediently went to room two. Inside, he found a Lizard with medium-fancy body paint and a human interpreter. He’d expected as much. Few Lizards were fluent enough in any human language to be efficient questioners. What he hadn’t expected was that he’d recognize the interpreter.

  The fellow’s name was Jakub Kipnis. He had a gift for languages; he’d been translating for the Lizards in Warsaw, and he got on better with them than most people did.

  He recognized Mordechai, too, in spite of the curly beard he’d grown and his general air of seediness. “Hullo, Anielewicz,” he said. “I never thought I’d see you here.” Mordechai didn’t like the look on Kipnis’ thin pale face. Some of the men the Germans had set up as puppet rulers of the Warsaw ghetto had fawned on their Nazi masters. Some of the Lizards’ helpers were all too likely to fawn on them, too.

  The Lizard sitting next to Kipnis spoke irritably in his own language. Anielewicz understood enough to know he’d asked the interpreter why he’d called the prisoner by the wrong name. “This is the male Shmuel, is it not?”

  Mordechai figured he could safely show he’d heard his own name. “Yes, Shmuel, that’s me,” he said, touching the brim of his cloth cap and doing his best to leave the impression that he was an idiot.

  “Superior sir, this male is now calling himself Shmuel,” Jakub Kipnis said. Mordechai had less trouble following him than he’d had understanding the Lizard; Kipnis spoke more slowly, thinking between words. “In Warsaw, this male was known as Mordechai Anielewicz.”

  Flee? Utterly futile. Even if the Lizard guard behind him didn’t cut him down, how could he break out of the prison camp? The answer was simple: he couldn’t. “You are Anielewicz?” he asked, pointing to Kipnis. The most he could hope to do now was confuse the issue.

  “No, you liar, you are,” the interpreter said angrily.

  The Lizard made noises like a steam shovel with a bad engine. He and Jakub Kipnis went back and forth, now mostly too fast for Mordechai to keep up with them. The Lizard said, “If this is Anielewicz, they will want him back in Warsaw. He has much to answer for.” Anielewicz shook his head. If he had to understand two sentences, why those two?

  “Superior sir, it is Anielewicz,” Kipnis insisted, slowing down a little. “Send him to Warsaw. The governor there will know him.” He stopped in consternation. “No-Zolraag has been replaced. His aides will know this male, though.”

  “It may be so,” the Lizard said. “Some of us are learning to tell one Big Ugly from another.” By his tone, he didn’t find that an accomplishment worth bragging about. He turned his eyes to the guard behind Anielewicz. “Take this male to the prison cells for close confinement until he is transported to Warsaw.”

  “It shall be done,” the Lizard said in his own language. Gesturing with his rifle barrel, he dropped into Yiddish: “Come along, you.”

  Mordechai sent Jakub Kipnis a venomous glance. Since he was still claiming to be Shmuel the partisan, that was all he could do. He wanted to give thetukhus-lekher of an interpreter something more than a glare by which to remember him, but consoled himself by thinking the traitor’s turn would come some day. It wasn’t as it had been under the Nazis. A lot of Jews had weapons now.

  “Come along, you,” the Lizard guard repeated. Helplessly, Anielewicz stepped out into the corridor ahead of him. The Lizard interrogator said something to the guard, who paused in the doorway to listen.

  The world blew up.

  That was Anielewicz’s first confused thought, anyhow. He’d been under aerial bombardment before, in Warsaw from the Nazis and then from the Lizards. One moment Mordechai was glumly heading toward prison-and probably toward much worse trouble than that. The next, he was hurled against the far wall of the hallway while ceiling timbers groaned and shifted and tore away from one another to let him see streaks of gray-blue sky.

  He staggered to his feet. A meter or two behind him, the Lizard guard was down, hissing piteously. The window in the interrogator’s office had blown in, skewering him with shards of shattered glass like shrapnel. His automatic rifle lay forgotten beside him.

  Head still ringing, Anielewicz snatched it up. He fired a short burst into the Lizard’s head, then looked into the office where he’d been grilled. The Lizard interrogator in there was down, too, and wouldn’t get up again; flying glass had flensed him.

  By the chance of war, Jakub Kipnis was not badly hurt. He saw Mordechai, saw the Lizard rifle, and made a ghastly attempt at a smile. “The German flying bomb-” he began. Mordechai cut him down with another short burst, then made sure of him with a shot behind the ear.

  That took care of the two Lizards and the man who’d known Anielewicz was Anielewicz. Behind him, an alarm began to ring. He thought it had to do with him till he smelled smoke-the building was afire. He set down the rifle, scrambled out of the now glassless window (actually, almost glassless; a sharp shard sliced his hand), and dropped to the ground. With any luck at all, no one would know he’d been in there, let alone that he’d been found out.

  Not far away, smoke still rose from an enormous crater. “Must have been a tonne, at least,” muttered Mordechai, who had more experience gauging bomb craters than he’d ever wanted to acquire. At the edge of the crater lay the wreckage of the flying bomb’s rear fuselage.

  He spared that barely a glance. The rocket or whatever it was had done more than wreck the prison camp’s administrative building. It had blown up in the middle of the yard. Broken men, and pieces of men, lay all around. Groans and shrieks in several languages rose into the sky. Some men, those nearest the crater and those who’d been unlucky enough to stop a chunk of the fuselage, would never groan or shriek or cry again.

  As he trotted over to do what he could for
the wounded, Anielewicz wondered whether the Nazis’ aim with their rocket had been that bad or that good. If they’d intended to drop it in the middle of the prison camp, they couldn’t have done a better job. But why would they want to do that, when so many of the men held here were Germans? But if they intended to hit anyplace else-the town of Piotrkow, say-then they might as well have been playing blind man’s bluff.

  He bent over a man who wouldn’t live long. The fellow stared up at him. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said in a choking voice. Blood poured from his nose and mouth.

  Mordechai knew what last rites were, but not how to give them. It didn’t matter; the Pole died before he could do anything. Anielewicz looked around for someone he actually had some hope of helping.

  WHAM!Off to the north, toward Piotrkow, another explosion came out of nowhere. Distance made it faint and attenuated. If the Germans had aimed the last rocket and this one at the same place, their aiming left a lot to be desired. Kilometers separated the two impacts.

  WHAM!Yet another explosion, this one a lot closer. Anielewicz staggered, went to one knee. A chunk of sheet metal crashed to the ground a couple of meters from where he had stood. Had it landed on top of him… He tried not to think about things like that.

  Men started running toward the northern edge of the camp. Looking around, Anielewicz saw why: the flying bomb had landed almost directly on top of a Lizard guard tower and had blown a great hole in the razor wire that confined the prisoners. Moreover, fragments from it had played havoc with the towers to either side. One was on fire, the other knocked off its legs.

  Anielewicz started running, too. He’d never have a better chance to escape. The Lizards opened fire from more distant guard towers, but they hadn’t figured on losing three at once. Some men went down. More scrambled into the crater the rocket had made and out the other side to freedom.

  As with the first flying bomb that had fallen in the camp, this one left part of its carcass behind by the crater. Some of the metal skin had peeled off, including the pieces that had almost mashed him. He’d been an engineering student before the war, and peered curiously at tanks-fuel tanks? — wrapped in glass wool, and at as much clockwork and piping as he’d ever seen all in one place. He wished he could take a longer, closer look, but getting away was more important.

  Bullets rattled off the flying bomb, then went elsewhere in search of more prey. Mordechai ran. The bullets came back, kicking up dirt around his feet. He rolled on the ground and thrashed wildly, in the hope of convincing the Lizard gunner he’d been hit. When the bullets stopped playing around him again, he got up and ran some more.

  “Sneaky bastard!” someone shouted from behind him in German. His head whipped around. He might have known Friedrich would get out while the getting was good.

  Ahead, the fleeing men fanned out broadly, some making for the brush a few hundred meters away, others pelting up the road toward Piotrkow, still others heading east or west across the fields toward farmhouses where they might find shelter.

  Friedrich slogged up even with him. “Damned if I don’t think we’re going to get away with this,” he bawled.

  “Kayn aynhoreh,”Mordechai exclaimed.

  “What’s that mean?” the big German asked.

  “Something like, don’t tempt fate by saying anything too good.” Friedrich grunted and nodded. Most of the bullets were behind them now. The Lizards seemed to have given up on the prisoners who’d escaped fastest, and were concentrating on keeping any more men from getting out through the hole the flying bomb had blown in the wire.

  Friedrich swerved to put some of the brush between him and the prison camp. Panting, he slowed to a fast walk. So did Anielewicz. “Well, Shmuel, you damned Jew, it’s just the two of us now,” Friedrich said.

  “So it is, you stinking Nazi,” Mordechai answered. They grinned at each other, but cautiously. Each of them sounded as if he were making a joke, but Anielewicz knew he’d meant what he said, and had a pretty good notion Friedrich had been kidding on the square, too.

  “What do we do now?” Friedrich asked. “Besides keep moving, I mean.”

  “That comes first,” Anielewicz said. “We ought to try to get far enough away so they can’t track us with dogs, or whatever they use. Afterwards… maybe we can hook on with a local guerrilla band and keep on making life interesting for the Lizards. Or maybe not. This part of Poland is pretty muchJudenfrei, thanks to you Nazi bastards.”

  Now Anielewicz didn’t sound like a man who was joking. Friedrich said, “Yeah, well, I can tell you stories about that, too.”

  “I’ll bet you can,” Mordechai said. “Save ’em, or we’ll be trying to kill each other, and that would just make the Lizards laugh. Besides, the Poles around here may not like Jews-”

  “They don’t,” Friedrich said with a grim certainty Anielewicz didn’t want to explore.

  Mordechai went on, “-but they don’t like Germans, either.” Friedrich scowled, but didn’t interrupt. Anielewicz finished, “Best bet, as far as I can see, is heading up to Lodz. It’s a good-sized city; strangers won’t stick out the way they would in Piotrkow. And it still has a good many Jews left.”

  “As if I should care about that.” Friedrich snorted, then sobered. “Or maybe I should-you Jew bastards have had practice with an underground, haven’t you?”

  “You Nazi bastards made us practice with one,” Anielewicz said. “So-Lodz?”

  “Lodz,” Friedrich agreed.

  Cabbage, black bread, potatoes. For variety, turnips or beets. Heinrich Jager wished he were back at the front, if for no other reason than the tinfoil tubes of meat and butter front-line soldiers got. You didn’t starve to death on cabbage, black bread, and potatoes, but after a while you started to wish you would. No matter how important the work he was part of, life in Germany these days felt cold and gray and dull.

  He speared the last piece of potato, chased the last bit of sauerkraut around his plate, soaked up the last juices from the sauerkraut with his bread-which, he had to admit, was better than the really horrid stuff the bakers had turned out in 1917. That still didn’t make it good.

  He got to his feet, handed the plate and silverware to a kitchen worker who took them with a word of thanks, and started out of the refectory. Opening the door, he almost ran into a tall man in a black SS dress uniform gaudy with silver trim.

  The SS colonel folded him into a bearhug. “Jager, you miserable son of a bitch, how the hell are you?” he boomed. A couple of physicists who had been eating in the refectory with Jager stared in disbelief and dismay at the raucous apparition invading their quiet little corner of the world.

  Life might remain cold and gray, but it wouldn’t be dull any more. “Hullo, Skorzeny,” he said. “How goes with you?” Life might abruptly end aroundStandartenfuhrer Otto Skorzeny, but it would never, ever be dull.

  The scar that furrowed the SS man’s left cheek pulled half his grin up into a fearsome grimace. “Still going strong,” he said.

  “As if you knew any other way to go,” Jager replied.

  Skorzeny laughed, as if that had been some sort of clever observation rather than simple truth. “You know someplace where we can talk quietly?” he asked.

  “You don’t have any idea how to talk quietly,” Jager said, and Skorzeny laughed again. “Come on, I’ll take you to my quarters.”

  “I’d need a trail of bread crumbs just to find my way around this place,” Skorzeny grumbled as Jager led him through the medieval maze of Schloss Hohentubingen. Once in Jager’s room, he threw himself into a chair with such abandon that Jager marveled when it didn’t collapse under him.

  “All right, how do you want to try to get me killed now?” Jager asked.

  “I’ve come up with a way, never you fear,” the SS man said airily.

  “Why does this not surprise me?”

  “Because you’re not a fool,” Skorzeny answered. “Believe me, I have come to know fools in all their awesome variety these past
few years. Some of them wear uniforms and think they’re soldiers. Not you-so much I give you.”

  “And for so much I thank you,” Jager said. He remained unsure whether Skorzeny qualified as a fool in uniform, even after most of a year’s acquaintance. The man took chances that looked insane, but he’d brought off most of them. Did that make him lucky or good? His string of successes was long enough for Jager to give him some benefit of the doubt. “How are you going to twist the Lizards’ stumpy little tails this time?”

  “Not their tails, Jager-the other end.” Skorzeny gave that grin again. Perhaps he intended it as disarming; no matter how he intended it, the scar twisted it into something piratical. “You’ve heard that the English have started using mustard gas against the Lizards?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that.” Jager’s stomach did a slow lurch. He’d spent hours sealed into a stifling gas mask during the First World War. He also remembered comrades who hadn’t got their masks on and sealed in time. His mouth curled down. “I don’t blame them, not really, but it’s an ugly business. And why did they have that gas ready, d’you think? — to use against us when we got over the Channel, unless I miss my guess.”

  “Probably.” Skorzeny waved a dismissive hand. He didn’t care about why; what and how were all that mattered to him. He added, “Don’t get up on your high horse, either. If the English had tried gassing us, we’d have shown them mustard gas is a long way from the nastiest thing around. We do things better these days than they did in the last war.”

  “No doubt.” Skorzeny sounded very certain. Jager wondered how he knew, how much he knew, and how the new gases, whatever they were, had been tested-and on whom. Asking such questions was dangerous. To Jager’s mind, so wasnot asking them, but few of his fellow officers agreed.

  Skorzeny went on, “We didn’t use gas against the Lizards for the same reason we didn’t use gas against the English: for fear of getting it back in turn. Even if we have better, being on the receiving end of mustard gas wouldn’t have been any fun.”