Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “We have now proved decisively what others began to demonstrate last year: the Lizards are not invulnerable. They can be defeated and driven back. Moreover, just as their weapons have on occasion discomfited us, we too have devised means of fighting for which they have as yet developed no countermeasures. This bodes well for future campaigns against them.”

  How it boded for the soul of mankind was another question, one he felt less confident about answering. Everyone was using gas against the Lizards now, and praising it to the skies because it killed them in carload lots. But if they vanished off the face of the earth tomorrow, how long till earthly nations remembered their old quarrels and started using gas on one another? How long till the Germans started using it on the Jews they still ruled? For that matter, how did he know they weren’t using it on the Jews they still ruled? Nothing came out of Germany but what little Hitler and Gobbels wanted known.

  Even as he thought about what mankind would do after the Lizards were vanquished, he realized beating them came first. And so he read on: “Wherever you who hear my voice may be, you, too, can join the fight against the alien invaders. You need not even take up a gun. You can also contribute to the war against them by sabotaging goods you produce if you work in a factory, by not paying, paying late, or underpaying the exactions they seek to impose on you, by obstructing them in any way possible, and by informing their foes of what they are about to do. With your help, we can make Earth so unpleasant for them that they will be glad to pack up and leave.”

  He finished the last line of the script just as the engineer drew a finger across his throat to show time was up. In the soundproof control room, the engineer clapped his hands, then pointed to Nathan Jacobi, who began reading the English version of Russie’s talk.

  Jacobi was a consummate professional; the engineer took for granted his finishing spot on. What struck Moishe about his colleague’s reading was how much of it he understood. When he’d first begun broadcasting for the BBC, he’d had next to no English. Now he could follow it pretty well, and speak enough to get by. He felt less alien in London than he sometimes had in purely Polish sections of Warsaw.

  “There, that’s done it,” Jacobi said when they were off the air. He clapped Moishe on the back. “Jolly good to be working with you again. For a while there, I doubted we should ever have the chance.”

  “So did I,” Moishe said. “I have to remind myself that this is warfare, too. I’ve seen altogether too much of the real thing lately.”

  “Oh, yes.” Jacobi got up and stretched. “The real thing is a great deal worse to go through, but you and I may be able to do more damage to the Lizards here than we could on campaign. I tell myself as much, at any rate.”

  “So do I,” Moishe said as he too rose. “Is Eric Blair broadcasting after us, as he often does?”

  “I believe so,” Jacobi answered. “You’ve taken a liking to him, haven’t you?”

  “He’s an honest man,” Russie said simply.

  Sure enough, Blair stood outside the studio door, talking animatedly with a handsome, dark-skinned woman who wore a plum-colored robe of filmy cotton-from India, Moishe guessed, though his knowledge of people and places Oriental had almost all been acquired since he came to England. Blair broke off to nod to the two Jewish broadcasters. “Hope you chaps have been giving the Lizards a proper hiding over the air,” he said.

  “I hope we did, too,” Jacobi answered, his voice grave.

  “The princess and I shall endeavor to do the same,” Blair said, dipping his head to the woman from India. His chuckle had a wheeze in it that Russie did not like. “I think that’s what they call an alliance of convenience: a princess and a socialist joining together to defeat the common foe.”

  “You wanted dominion status for India no less than I did,” the woman said. Her accent, so different from Moishe’s, made her hard to understand for him. He reminded himself to tell Rivka and Reuven he’d met a princess: not something a Jew was likely to do in Warsaw-or, from what he’d seen, in London, either.

  “India has more than dominion status these days,de facto if notde jure,” Eric Blair said. “It’s the rare and lucky ship that goes from London to Bombay, and even luckier the one that comes home again.”

  “How are things there?” Moishe asked. One thing he’d learned since coming to England was how narrow his perspective on the world had been. He wanted to learn as much as he could about places that had been just names, if that, to him.

  Blair said, “You will not be surprised to learn that Mr. Gandhi has made himself as unpleasant to the Lizards as he ever was to the Britishraj.”

  “The aliens do not know how to deal with masses of people who will not fight them but also refuse to labor for them,” the princess said. “Massacre has only made the Mahatma’s followers more eager to continue their nonviolent campaign against oppression and unjust rule-from anyone.”

  “That last bit would have brought out the censor’s razor blades and red ink had you tried to say it before the Lizards came,” Blair said. He looked at his watch. “We’d best get in there, or we shall be late. Good to see you, Russie, Jacobi.” He and the Indian woman hurried into the studio, closing the door behind them.

  The sun of early November was a cool, pale, fickle thing, scurrying through the sky low in the south and scuttling behind every cloud and bit of mist that passed. Even so, Moishe faced the weather with equanimity. In Warsaw, snow would have started falling a month earlier.

  He said his good-byes to Nathan Jacobi and hurried home to his Soho flat. Having been separated from his family when the Lizards invaded England made him appreciate them all the more. But when he got up to the flat, before he could even tell his wife he’d met a princess, she said, “Moishe, someone came round here looking for you today-a man with a uniform.” She sounded worried.

  Moishe didn’t blame her. That news was enough to worry anyone. When he first heard it, ice prickled up his spine. He needed a moment to remember where he was. “This is England,” he reminded Rivka-and himself. “NoGestapo here, no‘Juden heraus!’ Did he say what he wanted of me?”

  She shook her head. “He did not say, and I did not ask. Hearing the knock on the door, opening it to find the man with those clothes there…” She shivered. “And then he spoke to me in German when he saw I did not understand enough English to know what he needed.”

  “That would frighten anyone,” Moishe said sympathetically, and took her in his arms. He wished he could forget about the Nazis and Lizards both. He wished the whole world could forget about them both. The next wish that produced the desired effect would be the first.

  Someone knocked on the door. Moishe and Rivka flew apart. It was a brisk, authoritative knock, as if the fellow who made it had a better right to make it, had a better right to come into the flat, than the people who lived there. “It’s him again,” Rivka whispered.

  “We’d better find out what he’s after,” Moishe said, and opened the door. He had all he could do not to recoil in alarm after that: except for the different uniform, the man who stood there might have come straight off an SS recruiting poster. He was tall and slim and muscular and blond and had the dangerous look in his eye that was calculated to turn your blood to water if you ended up on the receiving end of it.

  But instead of shouting something like,You stinking sack of shit of a Jew, he politely nodded and in soft tones asked, “You are Mr. Moishe Russie?”

  “Yes,” Moishe said cautiously. “Who are you?”

  “Captain Donald Mather, sir, of the Special Air Service,” the blond young soldier answered. To Russie’s surprise, he saluted.

  “C–Come in,” Moishe said, his voice a little shaky. No SS man would ever have saluted a Jew, not under any circumstances. “You have met my wife, I think.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mather said, stepping past him. He nodded to Rivka. “Ma’am.” Social amenities apparently complete, he turned back to Moishe. “Sir, His Majesty’s government needs your help.”

&
nbsp; Alarm sirens began going off in Moishe’s mind. He slipped from English back into Yiddish: “What does His Majesty’s government think I can do for it? And why me in particular and not somebody else?”

  Captain Mather answered the second question first: “You in particular, sir, because of your experience in Poland.” He left English, too, for German. Moishe’s hackles did not rise so much as they might have: Mather made an effort, and not a bad one, to pronounce it with a Yiddish intonation. He was plainly a capable man, and in some not-so-obvious ways.

  “I had lots of experience in Poland,” Moishe said. “Most of it, I didn’t like at all, not even a little bit. Why does anyone think I would want to do something that draws on it?”

  “You’re already doing something that draws on it, sir, in your BBC broadcasts,” Mather replied. Moishe grimaced; that was true. The Englishman continued, making his German sound more Yiddish with every sentence: “I will admit, though, we have rather more in mind for you than sitting in front of a microphone and reading from a prepared script.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Moishe said. “You still haven’t answered what I asked you.”

  “I was coming round to it, sir; by easy stages,” Donald Mather said. “One thing you learned in Poland was that cooperating with the Lizards isn’t always the best of notions, if you’ll forgive your understatement.”

  “No, not always, but if I hadn’t cooperated with them at first, I wouldn’t be here arguing with you now,” Moishe said.

  “Saving yourself and your family-” Mather began.

  “-And my people,” Russie put in “Without the Lizards, the Nazis would have slaughtered us all.”

  “And your people,” Captain Mather conceded. “No one will say you didn’t do what you had to do when you joined the Lizards against the Nazis. But afterwards, you saw that mankind as a whole was your people, too, and you turned against the Lizards.”

  “Yes to all of this,” Moishe said, beginning to grow impatient. “But what does it have to do with whatever you want from me?”

  “I am coming to that,” Mather answered calmly. No matter how well he spoke, that external calm would have marked him as an Englishman; in his place, a Jew or a Pole would have been shouting and gesticulating. He went on, “Would you agree that in His Majesty’s mandate of Palestine, no effort to exterminate the Jews is now under way, but rather the reverse?”

  “In Palestine?” Moishe echoed. The mention of the name was enough to make Rivka sharply catch her breath. Moishe shook his head. “No, you aren’t doing anything like that.Nu?” Here, the multifarious Yiddish word meantcome to the point.

  He would have explained that to Mather, but the captain understood it on his own. Mather said, “The nub of it is, Mr. Russie, that there are Jews in Palestine who are not content with British administration there and have been intriguing with the Lizards in Egypt to aid any advance they might make into the Holy Land. His Majesty’s government would like to send you to Palestine to talk to the Jewish fighting leaders and convince them to stay loyal to the crown, to show them that, unlike yours, their situation is not so bad as to require intervention by the aliens to liberate them from it.”

  “You want to send me to Palestine?” Moishe asked. He knew he sounded incredulous, but couldn’t help it. Beside him, Rivka made an indignant noise. He corrected himself at once: “You want to send us-me and my family-to Palestine?” He couldn’t believe what he was saying. Occasionally, in Poland, he’d thought of emigrating, of makingaliyah, to the Holy Land. But he’d never taken the notion seriously, no matter how hard the Poles made life for a Jew. And, once the Nazis came, it was too late.

  Now this Englishman he’d known for five minutes was nodding, telling him the long-hopeless dream of his exiled people could come true for him. “That’s just what we want to do. We can’t think of a righter man for the job.”

  With a woman’s practicality, Rivka asked the next question: “How do we get there?”

  “By ship,” Donald Mather answered. “We can get you down to Lisbon without any trouble. Outbound from Lisbon, your freighter will meet a submarine to take you through the Straits of Gibraltar. From the submarine, you’ll board another freighter for the journey to Haifa. How soon can you be ready to leave?”

  “It wouldn’t be long,” Moishe said. “It’s not as if we have a lot to pack.” That was, if anything, an understatement. They’d come to England with only the clothes on their backs. They had more than that now, thanks to the kindness of the British and of their relatives here. But a lot of what they had wouldn’t come with them-why bring pots and pans to the Holy Land?

  “If I came for you day after tomorrow this same time, you’d be ready, then?” Captain Mather asked.

  Moishe almost laughed at him. If they had to leave, he and Rivka could have been ready in half an hour-assuming they found Reuven and dragged him away from whatever game he was playing or watching. A couple of days’ notice struck him as riches like those the Rothschilds were said to enjoy. “We’ll be ready,” he said firmly.

  “Good. Until then-” Mather turned to go.

  “Wait,” Rivka said, and the Englishman stopped. She went on, “For how long would we be going to-to Palestine?” She had to fight to say the incredible word. “How would you bring us back, and when?”

  “As for how long you’d stay,Frau Russie, it would be at least until your husband completed his mission, however long that might take,” Mather answered. “Once that’s done, if you want to return to England, we’ll arrange that, and if you want to stay in Palestine, we can arrange that, too. We do remember those who help us, I promise you that. Have you any other questions? No?” He saluted, did a smart about-turn, and headed for the stairwell.

  Moishe and Rivka stared at each other. “Next year in Jerusalem,” Moishe whispered. Jews had been making that prayer since the Romans sacked the Second Temple almost nineteen hundred years before. For almost all of them, it expressed nothing more than a wish that would never be fulfilled. Now-

  Now Moishe seized Rivka. Together, they danced around the inside of the flat. It was more than exuberance; he felt as if he could dance on the walls and ceiling as well as the floor. Rivka slowed sooner than he did. She kept a firm grasp on the essentials of the situation, saying, “They are not doing this for you, Moishe-they’re doing it for themselves. Who are these Jews conniving with the Lizards, anyhow?”

  “I don’t know,” Moishe admitted. “What could I know of what goes on in Palestine? But I know this much: if they want to play games with the Lizards, they’re making a mistake. The British aren’t starving them and killing them for sport, and that would be the only possible excuse for choosing the Lizards.”

  “You’ve seen that for yourself,” Rivka agreed, and then turned practical once more: “We’ll have to leave a lot of these clothes behind. The Holy Land is a warmer country than England.”

  “So it is.” Moishe hadn’t been thinking about such mundane things. “To pray at the Wailing Wall-” He shook his head in wonder. The idea was just starting to sink down from the front of his mind to the place where his feelings lived: he’d gone from stunned to joyful, and the joy kept growing. It was the first thing he’d ever imagined that might improve on being in love.

  It had seized Rivka, too. “To live the rest of our lives in Palestine,” she murmured. “England here, this is not bad-next to Poland even before the Nazis came, it’s a paradise. But to live in a land with plenty of Jews and no one to hate us-that would really be paradise.”

  “Who else lives in Palestine?” Moishe said, once again realizing his ignorance of the wider world was both broad and deep. “Arabs, I suppose. After Poles and Germans, they can’t be anything but good neighbors. If Reuven grows up in a country where no one hates him-” He paused. To a Polish Jew, that was like wishing for the moon. But here, even though he hadn’t wished for the moon, Captain Mather had just handed it to him.

  “They speak Hebrew in Palestine along with Yiddish, do
n’t they?” Rivka said. “I’ll have to learn.”

  “I’ll have a lot of learning to do myself,” Moishe said. Men read the Torah and the Talmud, so he’d learned Hebrew while Rivka hadn’t. But there was a difference between using a language to talk to God and using it to talk with your fellow men.When I get to Jerusalem, I’ll find out what the difference is, he thought, and shivered with excitement.

  It occurred to him then that he owed his chance of going to the Holy Land to the Lizards. Before they came, he’d been one more Jew among tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of others starving in the Warsaw ghetto. He’d been out on the streets in dead of night, trying to cadge some food to stay alive and praying to God to grant him a sign that He had not forsaken His people. He’d taken the sun-like glow of the explosive-metal bomb the Lizards had set off high above the city as an answer to that prayer.

  A lot of other people had taken it the same way. Almost willy-nilly, they’d made him into their leader, though becoming one had been the last thing in his mind. Because he’d looked like a leader to his people, he’d looked like one to the Lizards, too, when they drove Hitler’s thugs out of Warsaw. Had it not been for them, he would have stayed ordinary till the day he died-and he’d probably be dead by now.

  Haltingly, he spoke that thought aloud. Rivka heard him out, then shook her head. “Whatever you think you owe them, you paid it off long ago,” she said. “Yes, they saved us from the Nazis, but they did it for themselves, not for us. They just used us for their own purposes-and if it suits them to start killing us the way the Nazis did, they will.”

  “You’re right, I think,” Moishe said.

  “Of course I am,” she answered.

  He smiled, but soon sobered. Rivka had repeatedly shown she was better at dealing with the real world than he was. If she made a pronouncement like that, he would be wise to take it seriously. Then, all at once, he started to laugh: who would have thought that going to the Holy Land was part of the real world?