Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  It came in handy now. He and David Nussboym both grabbed for it at the same time, but Nussboym couldn’t reach it Mordechai’s arm was longer. He seized it and hit Nussboym in the head. Nussboym groaned but kept fighting, so Mordechai hit him again. After the third blow, Nussboym’s eyes rolled up and he went limp.

  Anielewicz struggled to his feet. His clothes were torn, he had a bloody nose, and he felt as if he’d just crawled out of a cement mixer. People crowded in the doorway, staring. “He was going to tell the Lizards who I am,” Mordechai said. His voice came out raw and rasping; Nussboym had come closer to strangling him than he’d thought.

  Bertha Fleishman nodded briskly. “I was afraid that would happen. Do you think we have to shut him up for good?”

  “I don’t want to,” Mordechai answered. “I don’t want any more Jews dead. He’s not a bad man, he’s just wrong here. Can we get him out of the way for good?”

  She nodded again. “He’ll have to go east, but we’ll manage. I have enough Communist friends to be sure he’ll get into Russia without ever having the chance to speak his piece to the Lizards.”

  “What’ll happen to him there?” Anielewicz asked. “They’re liable to ship him to Siberia.” He’d meant it for a joke, but Bertha’s sober nod said it was indeed a possibility. Mordechai shrugged. “If that’s how it is, then that’s how it is. He’ll have a chance to stay alive there, and we’d have to kill him here.”

  “Let’s get him out of here for now,” Bertha said. More quietly, she added, “You ought to think about disappearing, too, Mordechai. Not everyone who favors the Lizards is as open as Nussboym. You could be betrayed any time.”

  He bit his lip. She was right He knew she was right. But the idea of going on the road again, finding another alias and joining a partisan band, pierced him with a chill worse than any winter’s gale.

  “Good-bye, Lodz. Good-bye, flat,” he muttered as he took hold of David Nussboym’s feet.

  18

  Heinrich Jager felt like a table-tennis ball. Whenever he returned from a mission, he never knew where he would bounce up next: to Schloss Hohentubingen to help the men with the thick glasses and the high foreheads drive the explosive-metal bomb project forward, off on another run with Otto Skorzeny to tweak the Lizards’ snouts, or to lead panzers into battle, something he actually knew how to do.

  After he got back from Albi, they’d stuck him in a panzer again. That was where the powers that be stuck him when the war was going badly. If the Lizards overran theVaterland, everything else became irrelevant.

  He stood up in the cupola of his Panther. The wind tore at him, even through his reversible parka. He wore it white side out now, to go with the panzer’s whitewashed turret and hull. The machine, large and white and deadly, reminded him of a polar bear as it rumbed east from Breslau. As for the parka, it kept him from freezing. Next to the makeshifts theWehrmacht had used two winters before in Russia, it was a miracle. With it on, he was just cold. That seemed pretty good; he knew all about freezing.

  His gunner, a moon-faced corporal named Gunther Grillparzer, said, “Any sign of the Lizards yet, sir?”

  “No,” Jager answered, ducking back down inside the turret to talk. “I tell you the truth: I’m just as glad not seeing them.”

  “Ach, ja;”Grillparzer said. “I just hope that call from the damned Jews wasn’t a pack of damned moonshine. For all we know, the bastards want to make us motor around and burn up petrol for no reason.”

  “They wouldn’t do that.”I hope they wouldn’t do that, Jager added to himself. After what theReich had done to the Jews in Poland, how could he blame them if they wanted revenge? Aloud, he went on, “The commandant seems convinced the call was legitimate.”

  “Ja, Herr Oberst,”Grillparzer said, “but those aren’t angels that come out the commandant’s arse when he squats on the WC, are they?”

  Jager stood up again without answering. Russians and Lizards-and SSEinsatzgruppe men-followed orders without thinking about them. TheWehrmacht trained its soldiers to show initiative in everything they did-and if that made them less respectful of their superiors than they would have been otherwise, well, you had to take the bad with the good.

  They reached the crest of a low rise. “Halt,” Jager told the driver, and then relayed the command to the rest of the panzers in the battle group: anad hoc formation that essentially meant,all the armored vehicles we can scrape together for the moment. “We’ll deploy along this line. Hull down, everyone.”

  When a polar bear prowled through ice and snow, it was the most deadly predator in its domain. Foxes and badgers and wolverines stepped aside; seals and reindeer fled for their lives. Jager wished-oh, how he wished! — the same held true for his Panther, and for the Panthers and Panzer IVs and Tigers with it.

  Unfortunately, however, in straight-up combat it took anywhere from five to a couple of dozen German panzers to knock out one Lizard machine. That was why he had no intention of meeting the Lizards in straight-up combat if he could possibly help it. Strike from ambush, fall back, hit the Lizards again when they stormed forward to overwhelm the position you’d just evacuated, fall back again-that was how you hurt them.

  He wished for a cigarette, or a cigar, or a pipe, or a dip of snuff. He’d never tasted snuff in his life. He just wanted tobacco. There were stories that people had killed themselves when they couldn’t get anything to smoke. He didn’t know if he believed those or not, but he felt the lack.

  He had a little flask of schnapps. He took a nip now. It snarled its way down his gullet. It might have been aged half an hour before somebody poured it into a bottle. Then again, it might not have. After he drank, he felt warmer. The doctors said that was nonsense.To hell with the doctors, he thought.

  What was that off in the distance? He squinted through swirling snow. No, it wasn’t a horse-drawn wagon: too big and too quick. And there came another behind it, and another. His stomach knotted around the schnapps. Lizard panzers, heading this way. Down into the turret again. He spoke two brief sentences, one to the gunner-“The Jews weren’t lying”-and one to the loader-“Armor-piercing.” He added one more sentence over the wireless for the benefit of the battle group: “Hold fire to within five hundred meters.”

  He stuck head and shoulders out into the cold again, raising binoculars to his eyes for a better look. Not just Lizard panzers coming this way, but their personnel carriers, too. That was good news and bad news. The panzers could smash them, but if they disgorged their infantry before they were hit, they were very bad news. Lizard foot soldiers carried antipanzer rockets that madePanzerschrecks look like cheap toys by comparison.

  The panzer troops he commanded had plenty of fire discipline,danken Gott dafur. They’d wait as he had ordered, let the Lizards get close and then hit them hard before dropping back to the next ridge line. They’d-

  Maybe the crew of the Tiger a few hundred meters away hadn’t been paying attention to the wireless. Maybe their set was broken. Or maybe they just didn’t give a damn about fire discipline. The long-barreled 88 roared with the leaders of the Lizard force still a kilometer and a half away.

  “Dumbheaded pigdog!” Jager screamed. The Tiger scored a clean hit. One of the personnel carriers stopped dead, smoke spurting from it. Through the dying reverberations of the cannon shot, Jager heard the crew of the Tiger yelling like drunken idiots. The resemblance didn’t end there, either, he thought bitterly.

  He ducked into the turret once more. Before he could speak, Gunther Grillparzer said it for him: “The Lizards know we’re here.”

  “Ja.”Jager slapped the gunner on the shoulder. “Good luck. We’ll need it” He spoke to the driver over the intercom. “Listen for my orders, Johannes. We may have to get out of here in a hurry.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Oberst!”

  They were agood crew, probably not quite so fine as the one he’d had in France-Klaus Meinecke had been a genius with a cannon-but damn good. He wondered how much that was going to help them.
Exactly what he’d feared was happening. Instead of motoring blithely down the highway toward Breslau and presenting their flanks for close-range killing shots, the Lizard panzers were turning to face his position straight on. Neither a Tiger’s main armament nor a Panther’s could penetrate their glacis plates and turrets at point-blank range, let alone at fifteen hundred meters.

  And the personnel carriers were pulling back even farther. He got on the all-panzers circuit: “They know we’re here now. Panzer IVs, concentrate on the carriers.Gott mit uns, we’ll come out of this all right.”Or some of us will, anyhow, he glossed mentally. Some of them wouldn’t.

  The Panzer IVs along the line of the ridge opened up, not only with armor-piercing shells to wreck the personnel carriers but also with high-explosive rounds to deal with the Lizards who’d left before being hit. The order was cold-blooded calculation on Jager’s part. The IVs had the weakest cannons and the weakest armor of the machines in the battle group. Not only were they best suited for handling the carriers, they were also the panzers Jager could best afford to lose when the Lizards started shooting back.

  He’d hoped the Lizard panzers would come charging up the slope toward his position, cannon blazing. The Russians had made that mistake time and again, and the Lizards more than once. That kind of rush would give his Panther and Tiger crews close-range shots and shots at the Lizards’ side armor, which their cannon could penetrate.

  The Lizards were learning, though. Their panzer crews had been through combat, too, and had a notion of what worked. They didn’t need to charge; they could engage at long range. Even at fifteen hundred meters, a hit from one of their monster shells would blow-did blow-the turret right off a Panzer IV and send it blazing into the snow. Jager clenched his fists. With luck, the commander, gunner, and loader there never knew what hit them.

  Nor were the armored personnel carriers helpless against panzers. Their light cannon wouldn’t penetrate turret armor, but some of them carried rockets on launch rails on the sides of their turrets. Like the ones the Lizard infantry used, those had no trouble cracking a panzer.

  “Retreat!” Jager bawled on the all-hands frequency. “Make them come to us.” The Maybach in the Panther he personally commanded bellowed louder as it stopped idling and went into reverse.

  “This’ll be interesting,” Grillparzer shouted up at Jager. “Will we be in our new position before they get up here where we are now and start blasting away at us?”

  Interestingwasn’t the word Jager would have used, but it would do. The trouble was, the Lizard panzers were not only better armed and armored than the ones theWehrmacht had, they were faster, too. General Guderian hadn’t been joking when he said a panzer’s engine was as important a weapon as its gun.

  A Tiger maybe half a kilometer off to the north of Jager took a hit just as it was about to reach the cover of pine woods. It brewed up spectacularly, with a smoke ring going out through the cupola as if the devil were enjoying a cigar, and then with the ammunition cooking off in a display of orange and red fireworks. Some of the smoke that boiled out of it came from the burning flesh of its five crewmen.

  Grillparzer got a decent shot at one of the Lizard panzers, but its armor held the round out of the fighting compartment. A trail of fire appeared from out of a snowdrift, with no Lizard panzers nearby: the Lizard infantry had come up. The rocket hit a Panzer IV in the engine compartment, which burst into flames. Hatches popped open. Men ran for the trees. A couple of them made it. Machine-gun fire cut down the rest.

  Voices were screaming in Jager’s earphones: “They’re flanking us,Herr Oberst!” “Two enemy panzers have broken through. If they get in our rear, we’re done for.” “Can you call for reinforcements, sir?”

  If you were commanding a battle group, you didn’t have much hope of calling for reinforcements: battle groups got formed from the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel. Jager’s men were right-if the Lizards got behind them, they were in big trouble. That made the requisite order easy, no matter how distasteful it was.

  “Retreat,” Jager said on the all-panzers circuit “We’ll fall back to the first line of defenses around Breslau.”

  Three belts of fortifications ringed the city on the Oder. If they were penetrated, Breslau itself could hold for a long time, perhaps even in the way Chicago was holding in the United States. Though Jager had distant relatives on the other side of the Atlantic, nothing he’d seen in the First World War or heard in this one till the Lizards came left him thinking much of Americans as soldiers. Chicago made him wonder if he’d been wrong.

  But Chicago was far away. Breslau was close, and getting closer all the time as the driver retreated westward. The town had lots of bridges. If you managed to blow them all, Jager thought, the Lizards would have a rough time crossing the Oder. When that occurred to him, he realized he didn’t really believe theWehrmacht could make a stand at Breslau. But if they couldn’t hold the Lizards there, where could they?

  “So you see, General Groves-” Jens Larssen began.

  Before he could go on, Groves was glaring at him again, like a fat old bulldog getting ready to growl at a stranger across the street. “What I see, Professor, is somebody who won’t listen when I tell him no,” he said. “We aren’t packing up and moving to Hanford, and that’s all there is to it. I’m sick of your whining. Soldier, shut up and soldier. Do you understand me?”

  “Oh, I understand you, all right, you-” Larssen clamped his jaw down hard on the scarlet rage that welled up in his mind.You goddamn pigheaded son of a bitch. He got more creative from there. He’d never seen an atomic bomb go off, but the explosion inside his head felt like one.

  “They aren’t paying you to love me,” Groves said. “They’re paying you to do what I tell you. Get on back to work.” The boss of the Metallurgical Laboratory crew held up a hand. “No, take the rest of the day off. Go back to your quarters and think it over. Come tomorrow morning, I expect you to throw everything you have into this project You got it?”

  “I’ve got it,” Jens said through clenched teeth.

  He left the office and went downstairs. He’d leaned the Springfield he always carried against the wall down there. Now he slung it back over his shoulder. Oscar the guard said, “You don’t really need to tote that thing, sir. Not like you’re in the Army.” His companion, a jug-eared yahoo named Pete, laughed. His big, pointy Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

  Jens didn’t answer. He went out to the row of parked bicycles, lifted the kickstand to his with the side of his shoe, and started to head off north on the road back to Lowry Field, as Groves had ordered.

  Oscar’s voice pursued him: “Where are you going, sir? The piles are that way.” He pointed down toward the athletic field.

  The piles are on your miserable, snooping ass.With no tone at all in his voice, Larssen said, “General Groves wants me to take the day off and think about things in my quarters, so I’m not going back to the piles.”

  “Oh. Okay.” But instead of letting it go at that, Oscar spoke quietly to Pete for a moment, then said, “I guess I’ll come with you then, sir, make sure you get there all right.”

  Make sure you do what you’re told.Oscar didn’t trust him. Nobody here trusted him. Between the Met Lab and Colonel Hexham, they’d all got together to screw up his life eight ways from Sunday, and now they didn’t trust him. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing? “Do whatever you damn well please,” Larssen said, and started pedaling.

  Sure as shit, Oscar climbed aboard his own bicycle and rolled after him. Up University Boulevard to Alameda, then east on Alameda to the air base and the delightful confines of BOQ. Jens didn’t think much of the place as somewhere to do any serious contemplating, but he’d take the day off and see what sprang from it. Maybe he’d be able to look at things differently afterwards.

  The day was cold but clear. Jens’ long winter shadow raced along beside him, undulating over snowdrifts by the side of the road. Oscar’s lumpier shadow stayed right with it, just as
Oscar clung to Jens like a leech.

  For a long while, they had the road to themselves. Oscar knew better than to try any casual conversation. Larssen despised him quite enough when he was keeping his mouth shut.

  About halfway between the turn onto Alameda and the entrance to Lowry Field, they met another bicycle rider coming west. The fellow wasn’t making any great speed, just tooling along as if out for a constitutional. Jens’ jaw tightened when he recognized Colonel Hexham.

  Hexham, unfortunately, recognized him, too. “You-Larssen-halt!” he called, stopping himself. “What are you doing away from your assigned post?”

  Jens thought about ignoring the officious bastard, but figured Oscar wouldn’t let him get away with it. He stopped maybe ten feet in front of Hexham. Oscar positioned himself between the two of them. Oscar was a bastard, but not a dumb bastard. He knew how Jens felt about Colonel Hexham.

  “What are you doing away from your post?” Hexham repeated. His voice had a yapping quality, as if he were part lapdog. His face, as always, was set in disapproving lines. He had pouchy, suspicious eyes and a shriveled prune of a mouth with a thin smudge of black mustache above it. His hair was shiny and slick with Wildroot or some other kind of grease; he must have had his own private hoard of the stuff.

  Jens said, “General Groves ordered me to take a day off, go back to my quarters and just relax for a bit, then get back to it with a new attitude.”Fat chance, if I have to deal with a slug like you.

  “Is that so?” By the mockery Hexham packed into the question, he didn’t believe a word of it. He wasn’t any fonder of Jens than Jens was of him. Turning to Oscar, he said, “Sergeant, is what this man tells me true?”

  “Sir, it’s exactly the same thing he told me,” Oscar replied.

  Hexham clapped a dramatic hand to his forehead, a gesture he must have stolen from a bad movie. “My God! And you didn’t check it with General Groves yourself?”

  “Uh, no, sir.” Oscar’s voice suddenly went toneless. He might have been trying to deny he was there while standing in plain sight, a trick Larssen had seen enlisted men use before.