Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “Do the projections take into account the wretched weather on that part of the planet at this time of its year?” Kirel stroked computer keys. A corner of the screen that displayed the simulations map went first to a satellite image of endless storm systems rolling east from Deutschland toward Poland, and then to a video of wind whipping crystallized frozen water across a desolate landscape that resembled nothing so much as the inside of some tremendous refrigeration plant. “Our males and our equipment do not perform at optimum levels in such conditions.”

  “Truth. But we have improved over our levels during the previous local winter,” Atvar said stoutly. “And the cold, ironically, also hinders the activities of the Deutsche. Their poisonous gases are far less effective now than when the weather is warmer. We’ve also succeeded in developing filters to keep most gases out of the interior compartments of our fighting vehicles. This will boost both performance and morale.”

  “Except, perhaps, among the infantrymales still compelled to leave their fighting vehicles from time to time and perform their duties in the open,” Kirel said.

  Atvar sent him a dubious look. Ever since Straha’s attempted coup, Kirel had been scrupulously, almost ostentatiously, loyal. Unlike Straha, he did not believe in adventure for its own sake. Indeed, he hardly believed in adventure at all, as witness his protests against the upcoming campaign. But his very conservatism, a quality that endeared him to most males of the Race, might yet make him the focus for disaffected shiplords and officers. Atvar had enough troubles worrying about the political effects on his campaign on the Big Uglies. When he also had to worry about its political effects on his own males, he sometimes thought be was having to bear too heavy a burden.

  “Let us look at the benefits of success,” he said. “With Deutschland defeated, the whole northwest of the main continental mass comes under our control. We gain improved positions for any future assaults, whether by air alone or with ground forces, against Britain. We go from active combat to pacification over that whole area, freeing up troops for operations elsewhere. And the psychological impact on the remaining Tosevite not-empires will be profound.”

  “Truth, all of it, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “But, as the saying goes, to get the hatchling, you first must have the egg.”

  Atvar’s tailstump lashed harder now. “Let us not mince words, Shiplord,” he said coldly. “Do you advise me to abandon this planned effort, or shall we go forward with it? Proceeding in the face of your obstructionism is difficult.”

  “I obstruct nothing, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. Almost involuntarily, he hunched down into the posture of obedience. “I merely question methods and timing to obtain the best possible results for the Race. Have I not labored long and hard to support the implementation of this plan?”

  “Truth.” Atvar knew be sounded reluctant to admit as much, but he couldn’t help it. Externally, Kirel had done as he’d said. The fleetlord had been inferring the thoughts behind his actions. Maybe he was wrong. He hoped he was. Sighing, he said, “Blame it on Tosev 3, Shiplord. Anything that has anything to do with this cursed planet goes wrong one way or another.”

  “Exalted Fleetlord, there we agree completely,” Kirel said. “As soon as we detected radio signals from it, we should have realized all our previous calculations needed revising.”

  “We did realize that,” Atvar said. “What we didn’t have, what we should have had, was a feel forhow much revising they needed.”

  “And yet,” Kirel said in tones of wonder, “we may yet succeed, in spite of having to abandon plans already made.”

  For a Big Ugly, as Atvar had seen time after time-generally to his consternation-abandoning plans and making new ones on the spur of the moment (or even going ahead and acting without making new plans) was so common as hardly to be worth noting. For the Race, that attitude started at traumatic and got worse from there. Routine, organization, forethought-thanks to them, the Empire had endured for a hundred millennia and made two other species reverence the Emperor in the same way the Race did. Adhering to routine on Tosev 3 as often as not led straight to disaster, for the Big Uglies anticipated and exploited routine behavior.

  But deviating from routine had dangers of its own. The routine pattern was often the best one; deviations just made things worse. And the Race wasn’t good at thinking under such stress: the snap decisions males came up with were usually bad decisions. The Big Uglies exploited those, too.

  Atvar removed from the screen the map of the planned campaign against Deutschland. In its place he substituted a detailed chart of an urban area on the lesser continental mass. “As you say, we may yet succeed,” he told Kirel. “Here in Chicago, we have reversed the setbacks the American Tosevites inflicted upon us when the weather first turned, and are now moving forward once more. If the trend continues, the entire city may be in our hands by the end of local winter.”

  “May it prove so,” Kirel said. “Even if we do achieve victory there, the cost has proved very high. We threw many males, many fighting vehicles, many landcruisers into that grinding machine.”

  “Truth,” Atvar said sadly. “But once having begun the campaign to wrest control of the city from the Big Uglies, we had to go forward with it. If we abandoned it, the Tosevites would conclude we dared not press our attacks in the face of stiff opposition. We invested more than our males in the fight for Chicago; we invested our prestige as well. And that prestige will rise with a victory.”

  “This is also truth,” Kirel agreed. “Once joined, the battle could not be abandoned. Had we been able to anticipate the full cost, however, we might not have initiated the battle in the first place.” He let out a hissing sigh. “This has proved true in all too many instances on Tosev 3.”

  “Not always, though,” Atvar said. “And I have a special reason for hoping the conquest of Chicago will be successfully completed. Somewhere in the not-empire called the United States skulks the oh-so-redoubtable shiplord Straha.” He laced his voice with all the scorn he could muster. “Let the traitor see the might of the Race he abandoned. Let him have some time to contemplate the wisdom first of revolt against me and then of treachery. And, when our triumph is at last complete, let us bring him to justice. On Tosev 3, his name shall live forever among the colonists as a symbol of betrayal.”

  The Race’s memory was long. When Atvar said forever, he intended to be taken literally. He thought of Vorgnil, who had tried to murder an Emperor sixty-five thousand years before. His name survived, as an example of infamy. Straha’s would stand alongside it after the conquest of Tosev 3 was complete.

  Mordechai Anielewicz strode down the sidewalk, as if enjoying every moment of his morning outing. That the temperature was far below freezing, that he wore a fur cap with earflaps down, two pairs of wool trousers one inside the other, a Red Army greatcoat and felt boots, and heavy mittens, that his breath smoked like a chimney and crystals froze in his beard and mustache-by the way he strolled along, it might have been spring in Paris, not winter in Lodz.

  He was far from the only person on the street, either. Work had to get done, whether it was freezing or not. People either ignored the weather or made jokes about it “Colder than my wife after she’s talked with her mother,” one man said to a friend. They both laughed, building a young fogbank around themselves.

  The Lizards were busy on the streets of Lodz, too. Alien police, looking far colder and more miserable than most humans Mordechai saw, labored to get traffic off the main east-west streets. They had their work cut out for them, too, for as fast as they shooed people away, more spilled onto the boulevards they were fighting to clear.

  Not all of that was absentminded cussedness; quite a few men and women were being deliberately obstructive. Anielewicz hoped the Lizards didn’t figure that out. Things might get ugly if they did.

  Finally, the Lizards cleared away enough people and wagons to get their armored column through. The males peering out of the cupolas of tanks and armored personnel carriers loo
ked even more miserable than the ones on the street. They also looked absurd: a Lizard wearing a shaggy wolfskin cap tied on under his jaws resembled nothing so much as a dandelion gone to seed.

  Four tanks, three carriers… seven tanks, nine carriers… fifteen tanks, twenty-one carriers. He lost track of the lorries, but they were in proportion to the armored vehicles they accompanied. When the parade was done, he whistled softly between his teeth. West of Lodz, the Lizards had something big laid on. You didn’t have to be Napoleon to figure out what, either. West of Lodz lay… Germany.

  Still whistling, he walked down to the Balut Market square and bought a cabbage, some turnips, some parsnips, and a couple of chicken feet. They’d make a soup that tasted meaty, even if it didn’t have much real meat in it. Next to what he’d got by on in Warsaw, the prospect of a soup with any meat in it-the prospect of a soup with plenty of vegetables in it-seemed ambrosial by comparison.

  He wrapped his purchases in an old ragged cloth and carried them back to the fire station on Lutomierska Street. His office was upstairs, not far from the sealed room where people took refuge when the Nazis threw gas at Lodz. If they’d known what he knew, their rockets would have been flying an hour earlier.

  He fiddled around with the draft of a letter for Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski to present to the Lizard authorities, asking them to release more coal for heating. Having to rely on the Lizards’ dubious mercy grated on him, but every so often Rumkowski did win concessions, so the game was worth playing. Rumkowski had begged Himmler for concessions, too, and won a few. As long as he could be a big fish in the little pool of Jewish Lodz, he’d debase himself for the bigger fish in the bigger pools.

  People wandered in and out. Bertha Fleishman’s sister had had a baby girl the night before; along with everyone else, Anielewicz saidmazeltov. Even as people kept blowing one another to bits, they were having babies, too. He’d seen that in the ghetto. In the midst of horror worse than any he’d imagined, people kept falling in love and getting married and having children. He wondered if that was absolutelymeshuggeh or the sanest thing they could possibly do.

  Finally, three o’clock rolled around. That hour corresponded to a change of shift at the telephone exchange. Anielewicz picked up the phone and waited for an operator to come on the other end of the line. When one did, he called his landlady, Mrs. Lipshitz, and told her he’d be working late. She bore up under the news with equanimity. He tried again. When he heard the operator’s voice, he asked her to put him through to Rumkowski’s office. He asked a meaningless question about the upcoming request for more coal, then hung up.

  Muttering under his breath, he picked up the telephone once more. When the operator answered, he brightened. “Is that you, Yetta?” he said. “How are you this afternoon, darling?”

  “Saul?” she asked, as she’d been trained to do. Yetta wasn’t her real name. Mordechai didn’t know what it was, or what she looked like. The less he knew, the less he could give away if he fell into the Lizards’ hands.

  “The same. Listen, sweetheart, I need to talk to Meyer the baker. You know the one-his shop is right next to the Balut.”

  “I’ll try to put you through,” Yetta said. “We’ve been having some trouble with the wires down there, so it may take a while. Please be patient.”

  “For you darling, anything,” Anielewicz said. The Balut was code for Breslau, the nearest major city in German hands; had he wanted Poznan, he’d have asked for an establishment on Przelotna Street. Telephone lines between Lodz and Breslau were supposed to be down. In fact, theywere down, but here and there illicit ground lines ran between Lizard-held territory and that which the Germans still controlled. Getting through on those lines wasn’t easy, but people like Yetta were supposed to know the tricks.

  Mordechai hoped she knew the tricks. He didn’t want to call Breslau, not so you’d notice, but he didn’t see that he had any choice, either. The Nazis, curse them, needed to know something large and ugly was heading their way. One reason the Lizards were relatively mild in Poland was that they had the Germans right next door, and needed to keep the locals contented. If Hitler and his crew folded up, the Lizards would lose their incentive to behave better.

  Gevalt,what a calculation to have to make, Anielewicz thought.

  Sooner than he’d expected, the phone on the other end of the line started ringing. Somebody picked it up.“Bitte?” came the greeting in crisp German. The connection was poor, but good enough.

  “Is this the shop of Meyer the baker?” Mordechai asked in Yiddish, and hoped the Nazi on the other end was on the ball.

  He was. Without missing a beat, he answered,“Ja. Was wilist du? — What do you want?”

  Anielewicz knew that was thedu of insult, not intimacy, but held on to his temper. “I want to give an order I’ll pick up a little while from now. I want you to bake me fifteen currant buns, twenty-one onion bagels, and enough bread to go with them. No, I don’t know how much yet, not exactly; I’ll try to call you back on that. Do you have it? Yes, fifteen currant buns. How much will that come to?… Meyer, you’re agonif and you know it.” He hung up in a good display of high dudgeon.

  A voice came from the doorway: “Laying in supplies?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes, Nussboym,” Mordechai answered, hoping he sounded calmer than he felt. “I was going to bring it all in so we could celebrate Bertha’s niece. Children deserve celebrating, don’t you think?” Now he’d have to go over to Meyer’s and buy all that stuff.

  David Nussboym walked into Mordechai’s room. He was several years older than Anielewicz, and a lot of the time acted as if he thought Mordechai had no business doing anything more than wiping his snotty nose. Now, scowling, he spoke in the manner of a professor to an inept student: “I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re lying to me, and that you were passing on code of some kind. There’s only one kind of code you’re likely to be passing, and only one set of people you’re likely to be passing it to. I think you’ve turned into Hitler’stukhus-lekher.”

  Slowly, deliberately, Anielewicz got to his feet He was three or four centimeters taller than Nussboym, and used that height advantage to look down his nose at the older man. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said, his voice silky with menace. “You gabble on abouttukhus-lekhers — I think you can lickmy arse.”

  Nussboym stared. Nobody had talked to him like that since the Lizards ran the Germans out of Lodz. He’d had a year and a half to get used to beingsomebody. But he also had considerable native spirit, and the awareness that those in authority backed him. After drawing back a pace in surprise, he thrust his chin forward and snapped, “I wouldn’t talk so fine if I were you. I’ve been doing some quiet checking, Mr. Mordechai Anielewicz-oh, yes, I know who you are. Some males of the Race back in Warsaw would be very interested in having a word or two with you. I haven’t said anything to my friends there because I know these things can be misunderstandings, and you’ve done good work since you got here. But if you’re going to bring the Nazis back into Poland-”

  “God forbid!” Mordechai broke in, with complete sincerity. “But I don’t want the Lizards in Germany, either, and you can’t understand that side of the coin.”

  “I want Hitler dead. I want Himmler dead. I want Hans Frank dead. I want every Nazi bastard with SS on his collar tabs dead,” Nussboym said, his face working. “That wouldn’t begin to be payment enough for what they did to us. I’d sooner kill them all myself, but if I have to let the Race do it for me, I’ll settle for that.”

  “And then what happens?” Anielewicz demanded.

  “I don’t care what happens then,” David Nussboym answered. “That’s plenty, all by itself.”

  “But it’s not, don’t you see?” Mordechai said, something like desperation in his voice. “After that, who stops the Lizards from doing exactly as they please? If you know who I am, you know I’ve worked with them, too. They don’t make any bones about it: they intend to rule mankind forever. When they say foreve
r, they don’t mean a thousand years like that madman Hitler. They mean forever, and they aren’t madmen. If they win now, we won’t get a second chance.”

  “Better them than the Germans,” Nussboym said stubbornly.

  “But you see, David, the choice isn’t that simple. We have to-” Without changing expression, without breaking off his flow of words, Amelewicz hit Nussboym in the belly, as hard as he could. He’d intended to hit him in the pit of the stomach and win the fight at the first blow,blitzkrieg — fashion, but his fist landed a few centimeters to one side of where he wanted to put it Nussboym grunted in pain but instead of folding up like a concertina, he grappled with Mordechai. They fell together, knocking over with a crash the chair on which Anielewicz had been sitting.

  Mordechai had done a lot of fighting with a rifle in his hand. It was a different business altogether when the fellow you were trying to beat wasn’t a tiny spot seen through your sights, but was at the same time doing his best to choke the life out of you. Nussboym was stronger and tougher than he’d figured, too. Again, he realized being on the opposite side didn’t turn you into a sniveling coward.

  Nussboym tried to knee him in the groin. He twisted aside and took the knee on the hip. He would have thought it even less sporting had he not tried to do the same thing to Nussboym a moment earlier.

  They rolled up against Mordechai’s desk. It was a cheap, light, flimsy thing, made of pine and plywood. Mordechai tried to bang Nussboym’s head against the side of it. Nussboym threw up an arm just in time.

  A heavy glass ashtray fell off the desk. Anielewicz was damned if he knew why he’d kept the thing around. He didn’t smoke. Even if he had smoked, nobody in Poland had any tobacco these days, anyhow. But the ashtray had been on his desk when he got the office, and he hadn’t bothered getting rid of it.