Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “And yet, the destruction was not so bad as it would have been had these mortar rounds contained explosives rather than poison gas. Now that the plant has been decontaminated, it is ready to resume full operation.”

  “Ready physically, yes.” Atvar felt ready himself, ready to bite something. In lieu of an actual enemy, poor Kirel would have to do. “Of course, the decontamination cost us four irreplaceable males of the Race. Of course, the gas attack itself killed most of one entire shift of highly trained Big Uglies. Of course, the Big Uglies who work the other two shifts are afraid to go back into the plant even if it is decontaminated, for one thing because they don’t believe it truly is and for another because they fear the Deutsche will attack once more-and how can we blame them for that when we fear it ourselves? Other than these minor details, the plant is, as you said, ready to start up again.”

  Kirel crouched down, as if he expected to be bitten. “Exalted Fleetlord, it is merely a matter of bringing in other Tosevites who have this skill: either that or making it plain to the locals that if they do not do this work, they will not eat.”

  “Bringing Tosevites into one area from another is far more difficult than it would be on a properly civilized world,” Atvar said, “for they are not simply Tosevites, essentially the same regardless of from which part of the planet they spring. Some are Francais Tosevites, some are English Tosevites, some are Italiano Tosevites, some are Mexicano Tosevites, and so on. They all have their own foods, they all have their own languages, they all have their own customs, and they all think their ways are superior to everyone else’s, which touches off fights whenever groups from two regions come together. We’ve tried; the Emperor knows we’ve tried it.” He cast down his eyes not so much in reverence as in worn resignation. “It does not work.”

  “The other approach will, then,” Kirel said. “No matter what foods they eat, all the Big Uglies must eat some foods. If they fail to produce what we require of them, they will also fail to be fed.”

  “This has some merit, but, again, not so much as I would wish,” Atvar said. “The sabotage level in Tosevite factories producing goods for us is already unacceptably high. Wherever we try to coerce the workers to produce more or produce under harsher conditions, it goes higher. This is intolerable when the product under discussion is as important as a gas mask.”

  “Truth,” Kirel said again, this time wearily. “The Big Uglies’ poison gas has already lowered the morale of fighting males to the point where they have shown reluctance to go into combat in areas bordering the Deutsche. And now the Americans are also beginning to deploy it in large quantities. If males cannot have confidence in their protection, their fighting spirit will plummet further, with unfortunate consequences for our efforts here.”

  “Unfortunate consequences indeed,” Atvar said. What if his males simply upped and quit fighting? He’d never imagined such a thing. No commander in the history of the Race (and perhaps not in its prehistory, either) had ever had to imagine such a thing. The Race’s discipline had always proved reliable-but nothing had ever tested it as it was being tested now.

  “If the males waver, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, “perhaps we can bolster their spirits with the Tosevite herb known as ginger.”

  Atvar stared at him.

  Kirel crouched again, lower than he had before “It was intended as a joke, Exalted Fleetlord, nothing more.”

  “It isnot funny,” Atvar said. It also wasn’t the worst idea he’d ever heard, not in the present circumstances. That frightened him more than anything.

  The Lizards’ air-raid alarms went off in Lodz. They weren’t sirens, as they would have been had human beings made them. Instead, they reminded Mordechai Anielewicz of nothing so much as the sound of a cauldron full of sizzling fat-except the cauldron had to be half the size of Poland. They were, he gathered, an enormously amplified version of the noise a Lizard made when something frightened it.

  All that ran through his mind in less time than he needed to snatch up a gas mask and stick it on his head. Then, along with the rest of the Jews in the offices above the fire station, he dashed for the sealed room. People got in one another’s way, cursing and stumbling and falling down.

  He made it to the sealed room just as a Nazi rocket came down with a crash. He tried to gauge how far away it had landed by the sound of the explosion, but that was tricky these days. The rockets that carried gas didn’t make a bang nearly so big as that from the ones carrying explosives-but they were much more to be feared, even so.

  “Shut the door!” four people bawled at once.

  With a slam, somebody obeyed. Packed into the middle of the sardinelike crush and turned the wrong way anyhow, Mordechai couldn’t see who. He looked up at the ceiling. Fresh plaster gleamed all around its periphery, covering over the cracks between it and the walls. Similar plaster marred the paint on those walls where they joined one another and also covered the molding that had marked their separation from the floor. Even if a gas-carrying rocket hit close by, the sealed room would-everyone inside hoped-let the people it sheltered survive till the deadly stuff dissipated.

  Splashes said people nearest the doorway were soaking cloths in a bucket of water and stuffing them into the cracks between the door and the wall. The German poison gas was insidious stuff. If you left a chink in your armor, the gas would find it.

  The Lizards’ alarm kept hissing. Before long, the merely human air-raid siren added its wail to the cacophony. “Does that mean we’re not done, or just that people are too addled to turn those noisy things off?” one of the secretaries asked, her voice muffled by the mask she wore.

  “We’ll find out,” Anielewicz said, along with three other men and a woman. Lately, the Nazis had found a new way to keep the Lizards and humans in Lodz from getting anything done: lobbing rockets at the city every so often, making people take shelter and stay there for fear of gas. Not everyone had a sealed room to which to go, and not all sealed rooms were as cramped as this one, but the ploy was good enough to tie Lodz in knots.

  “I wish the Lizards would shoot down the rockets, the way they did when the Nazis first started firing them at us,” a woman said.

  “The Lizards are almost out of their own rockets,” Mordechai answered. “These days, they only use them when one of the Germans’ happens to head straight for an installation of theirs.” That wasn’t an everyday occurrence; while the Lizards could make rockets that went exactly where they wanted, those of the Nazis were wildly inaccurate. Anielewicz went on, “If a rocket lands in the middle of Lodz, that’s just too bad for the people under it.”

  “The Race is doing what it can for us,” David Nussboym declared. Several people nodded emphatically. Mordechai Anielewicz rolled his eyes. He suspected he wasn’t the only one, but with everybody in concealing gas masks, he couldn’t be sure. The Jewish administration and fighters in Lodz were in a delicate position. They had to cooperate with the Lizards, and some-Nussboym among them-still did so sincerely. Others, though, hurt the aliens every chance they got, so long as they could do it without getting discovered. Keeping track of who was in which camp made life more interesting than Anielewicz liked.

  Another blast, this one close enough to shake the fire station. Even without a large charge of explosive, several tons of metal falling out of the sky made for a big impact. Anielewicz shivered. Working against the Lizards often meant covertly working with the Nazis, even when their poison gas was killing Jews inside Lodz. Some Jews supported the Lizards simply because they could not stomach working with the Nazis no matter what.

  Anielewicz understood that. He sympathized with it, but not enough to feel the same way himself. The Nazis had been gassing Polish Jews before the Lizards arrived, and they’d kept right on doing it even after the Lizards took Poland away from them. They were without a doubt bastards; the only good thing Mordechai could think to say about them was that they were human bastards.

  Minutes crawle
d slowly past Mordechai kept hoping, praying for the all-clear signal. Instead, another rocket landed. The siren and the alarm hiss went on and on. He drew in breath after breath of stagnant air. His feet began to hurt. The only place to sit-or rather, squat-in the sealed room was over a latrine bucket in a tiny curtained corner. Just getting there wasn’t easy.

  At last the amplified hiss faded and the sirens changed to a warbling note before ceasing altogether.“Gevalt!” somebody said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Is it safe?” somebody else asked. “Just because the rockets aren’t coming, does that mean the gas has gone away?”

  “We can’t stay here forever,” Mordechai said. “I’ll go out and look around, see if anyone close by is down from the gas. If I don’t come back in five minutes… you’ll know I shouldn’t have gone.” With such gallows humor, he elbowed his way toward the door.

  When he got outside, he was relieved not to find people lying dead on Lutomierska Street in front of the fire station. He hadn’t expected he would find that; none of the explosions had sounded close enough to produce such a result. But the Germans’ gas was insidious stuff, and sometimes spread more in one direction than another. The minute you stopped assuming it could kill you, it probably would.

  He looked around. One column of smoke was rising from the north, from the Polish part of Lodz, the area where Germans who’d called the place Litzmannstadt had settled before the Lizards came. Not many of them were left; the Poles and the Jews had had their revenge. Too bad, in a way. There would have been delicious irony in the Nazis’ gassing the Germans they’d sent out to dwell in a land that wasn’t theirs.

  More smoke, though, rose from closer to home. One of the rockets had hit in the Jewish district. That must have been the second one, Mordechai thought, the one that shook the station. He snarled. Even now, fighting the Lizards, the Nazis were killing Jews. He was sure they knew it, too. They probably thought it was a hell of a good joke-and that some of the Jews were cooperating with them against the Lizards an even better one.

  He went back inside before the people in the sealed room decided he’d become a casualty, too. He hurried upstairs. “It’s safe to come out,” he said. “We had a hit in the ghetto, though.” Now that the Germans were gone, it wasn’t formally a ghetto any more. It still functioned as one, though, and the name lingered.

  “The fire engine will have to go tend to it,” David Nussboym said. “I volunteer to ride along.” That took courage; the Germans’ gas could kill you not only if you breathed it but if it got on your skin. Anielewicz would have preferred to think of anyone who collaborated with the Lizards as a spineless coward. Nussboym complicated his picture of the world.

  He wanted to volunteer himself, to show Nussboym people who disagreed with him had spirit, too. But he made himself keep quiet. With the collaborator away from the offices, people who wanted to deal with the Lizards instead of sucking up to them could speak freely.

  “Come on,” said Solomon Gruver, the big, burly man who led the fire brigade and drove the engine. His men and Nussboym ran for the stairs.

  “I hope the people in the area are already hosing down the streets and the buildings,” Anielewicz said. “Between them and the engines, they should be able to flush most of the gas down the mains.” He laughed, a haunted, hollow sound inside his mask. “We’re so used to dealing with the unspeakable that we’ve got very good at developing procedures for it. Either that proves we’re clever and quick or that we’re utterly damned. Maybe both.”

  The fire engine roared away, bell clanging. “Do you think we can take our masks off?” a woman named Bertha Fleishman asked. She was drab and mousy; no one, human or Lizard, took any special notice of her. That made her one of the most valuable spies the Jews in Lodz had: she could go anywhere, hear anything, and report back.

  “Let’s find out.” Anielewicz pulled the mask off his head. He took a couple of deep breaths, then gasped and crumpled to the floor. Instead of crying out in alarm and dismay, people swore at him and looked around for things to throw. The first time he’d played that joke, they’d been properly horrified. Now they halfway looked for it, though he didn’t do it all the time.

  The rest of the people in the sealed room took off their masks, too. “Whew!” someone said. “It’s just about as stuffy in here with them off as it is with them on.”

  “What are we going to do?” Bertha Fleishman said. “If we get rid of the Lizards, we get the Germans back. For us in particular, that would be worse, even if having the Germans win and the Lizards lose would be better for people as a whole. After we’ve suffered so much, shouldn’t we be able to live a little?” She sounded wistful, plaintive.

  “Why should this time be different from all other times?” Anielewicz said. The reply, so close to the first of the Four Questions from the Passover Seder but expecting a different response, brought a sigh from everyone in the room. He went on, “The real question should be, What do we do if the Lizards get sick of the Germans harassing them and decide to put everything they have into smashing theReich?”

  “They tried that against the English,” a man said. “It didn’t work.”

  “And thank God it didn’t,” Mordechai said, wondering if he’d sent Moishe Russie into worse danger than that from which he’d escaped. “But it’s not the same. The Lizards’ logistics in England were very bad. They had to fly all their soldiers and all their supplies up from southern France, so it was almost as if they were trying to invade by remote control. It wouldn’t be like that if they attacked the Nazis. They’re right next door to them, here and in France both.”

  “Whatever they do, they probably won’t do it right away, not with snow on the ground,” Bertha Fleishman said. “They hate the cold. Come next spring, it may be something to worry about. Until then, I think they’ll hold back and try to ride out whatever the Nazis throw at them.”

  Thinking about the way the Lizards did things, Anielewicz slowly nodded. “You may be right,” he said. “But that only gives us more time to answer the question. It doesn’t make it go away.”

  Teerts did not like flying over Deutschland. He hadn’t liked flying over Britain, either, and for much that same reason: more and more Tosevite jets in the air, along with antiaircraft fire that seemed thick enough to let him get out of his killercraft and walk from one shell burst to the next.

  His mouth dropped open in ironic laughter. Fire from the Big Uglies’ antiaircraft guns had done no more than put a couple of holes in the skin of his killercraft. As best he could figure, the one time he’d been shot down was when he’d had the colossal bad luck to suck infantrymales’ bullets into both engine turbines in the space of a couple of moments… and his luck had only got worse once he descended inside the Nipponese lines.

  He never, ever wanted to be captured again. “I’d sooner die,” he said.

  “Superior sir?” That was Sserep, one of his wingmales.

  “Nothing,” Teerts said, embarrassed at letting his thoughts go out over an open microphone.

  He checked his radar. The Deutsche had some killercraft in the air, but none close enough to his flight to be worth attacking. He also watched the Tosevites’ aircraft to make sure they weren’t pilotless machines like the ones he’d encountered over Britain. Orders on conserving antiaircraft missiles got more emphatic with every passing day. Before long, he expected the fleetlord to issue one that said something like,If you have already been shot down and killed, it is permissible to expend one missile against the enemy aircraft responsible; expenditure of two will result in severe punishment.

  He spotted a dark gray plume of smoke rising up from the ground and hissed with glee. That was a railroad engine, burning one of the incredibly noxious fuels the Tosevites’ machines employed. Whatever a railroad engine was hauling-Big Uglies, weapons, supplies-it was a prime target He spoke to Sserep and Nivvek, his other wingmale, to make sure they saw it, too, then said, “Let’s go shoot it up.”

  He dropped d
own to low altitude and reduced his airspeed to make sure he could do a proper job of raking the target. His fingerclaw stabbed at the firing button of the cannon. Flames stabbed out from the nose of his killercraft; the recoil of the cannon and the turbulence from the fired shells made it shudder slightly in the air.

  He yelled with savage glee as puffs of smoke spurted from the railroad cars. As he shot over the locomotive that pulled the train, he yanked the stick back hard to gain some altitude and come around for another pass. Acceleration tugged at him; the world went gray for a moment. He swung the killercraft through a ninety-degree roll so he could look back at the train. He yelled again; either Sserep or Nivvek had hit the engine hard, and it was slowing to a stop. Now he and the other two males could finish destroying it at their leisure.

  Off in the middle distance on his radar set, something-half a dozen somethings-rose almost vertically into the air. “What are those?” Nivvek exclaimed.

  “Nothing to worry about, I don’t think,” Teerts answered. “If the Deutsche are experimenting with antiaircraft missiles of their own, they have some more experimenting to do, I’d say.”

  “Truth, superior sir,” Nivvek said, amusement in his voice. “None of our aircraft is even in the neighborhood of those-whatever-they-ares.”

  “So I see,” Teerts said. If they were missiles, they were pretty feeble. Like other Tosevite flying machines, they seemed unable to exceed the speed of sound in the local atmosphere. They climbed toward the peak of their arc in what looked to be a ballistic trajectory… whereupon Teerts forgot about them and gave his attention over to smashing up the train.

  It had been carrying infantrymales, perhaps among other things. The first pass hadn’t got all of them, either; some had bailed out of the damaged coaches. The gray-green clothes they wore were hard to see against the ground, but muzzle flashes told Teerts some of them were shooting at him. Memories of the Nipponese made fear blow through him in a choking cloud-what if the Big Uglies got lucky twice with him?