Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Still another crash-this one knocked Russie off his feet and showed daylight through a hole in the far wall. As he curled up into a frightened ball, he wondered what the devil was going on. The Nazis couldn’t have fired three rocket bombs so fast… could they? Or was it artillery? How could they have brought artillery through Lizard held territory to shell Lodz?

  His ears rang, but not so much that he couldn’t hear the nasty chatter of gunfire. A Lizard ran down the hall, carrying one of his kind’s wicked little automatic rifles. He fired out through, the hole the shells had made in the wall. Whoever was outside returned fire. The Lizard reeled back, red, red blood spurting from several wounds.

  Someone-a human-burst in through the hole. Another Lizard came running up. The man cut him down; he had a submachine gun that at close range was as lethal, as anything the aliens used. More men rushed in behind the first. One of them shouted, “Russie!”

  “Here!” Moishe yelled. He uncoiled and scrambled to his feet, hope suddenly overpowering fright.

  The fellow who’d called his name spoke in oddly accented Yiddish: “Stand back, cousin. I’m going to blow the lock off your door.”

  Spy stories came in handy after all. Russie pointed to the floor of the corridor. “No need. There’s the key. This mamzer”-he pointed to the unconscious Pole-“was about to take me away for more questions.”

  “Oy. Wouldn’t that have been a balls-up?” The last wasn’t in Yiddish; Moishe wasn’t sure what language it was in. He had precious little time to wonder, the man grabbed the key, turned it in the lock. He yanked the door open. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  Moishe needed no further urging. Alarms were clanging somewhere, off in the distance; power here seemed to be out. As he ran toward the hole in the outer wall, he asked, “Who are you, anyway?”

  “I’m a cousin of yours from England. David Goldfarb’s my name. Now cut the talk, will you?”

  Moishe obediently cut the talk. Bullets started flying again; he ran even harder than he had before. Behind him, somebody screamed. The medical student part of him wanted to go back and help. The rest made him keep running-out through the hole, out through the open space around the prison, out through a gap in the razor wire, out through the screaming, gaping people in the street.

  “There are machine guns on the roof,” he gasped. “Why aren’t they shooting at us?”

  “Snipers,” his cousin answered. “Good ones. Shut up. Keep running. We aren’t out of this mess yet.”

  Russie kept running. Then, abruptly, his companions, those who survived, threw away their weapons as they rounded a corner. When they rounded another corner, they stopped running. David Goldfarb grinned. “Now we’re just ordinary people-you see?”

  “I see,” Moishe answered-and, once it was pointed out to him, he did.

  “It won’t last,” said one of the gunmen who’d been with Goldfarb. “They’ll turn this town inside out looking for us. Somebody kills a Lizard, they get nasty about that.” His teeth showed white through tangled brown beard.

  “Which means it’s a good idea to get away from the net before they go fishing,” Goldfarb said. “Cousin Moishe, we’re going to take you back to England.”

  “Without Rivka and Reuven, I won’t go.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Russie realized how selfish and boorish they sounded. These men had risked their lives to save him; their comrades had died. Who was he to set conditions on what they did? But he didn’t apologize, because however selfish what he’d said sounded, he also realized he’d meant it.

  He waited for Goldfarb to scream at him, and for the other man-who looked tough enough for anything, no matter how desperate to pound him senseless and then do whatever he chose. Instead they just kept walking along, easygoing, as if he’d made a remark about the weather. Goldfarb said, “That’s taken care of. They’ll be waiting for us along the way.”

  “That’s-wonderful,” Moishe said dazedly. Too much was happening too fast for him to take it all in. He let his cousin and the other fighter lead him through the streets of Lodz while he tried to adjust to the heady joys of freedom. It made him giddy, as if he’d gulped down a couple of shots of plum brandy on an empty stomach.

  A tattered poster with his face on it peered down from a wall. He rubbed his chin. The Lizards hadn’t let him use a razor, so his beard was coming back. It wasn’t as long as he’d worn it before, but pretty soon he’d look like his pictures again.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Goldfarb said when he fretted out loud. “Once we get you out of town, we’ll take care of things like that.”

  “How will you get me out?” Moishe asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Goldfarb repeated.

  His nameless friend laughed and said, “Asking a Jew not to worry is like asking the sun not to rise. You can ask all you like, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get what you ask for.” That was apt enough to make Moishe laugh, too.

  Before long, they walked into a block of flats. Lodz was already beginning to boil around them. The sound of explosions and gunfire carded a long way; rumor rippled out from around the prison almost as fast as the racket. The two women who went into the building just behind Moishe and his companions were already wondering who had escaped. If only they knew, he thought dizzily.

  They climbed stairs. The fellow without a name rapped on a door-one, two, one again. “Spy stuff,” David Goldfarb muttered. The other fellow poked him in the ribs with an elbow, hard enough to make him give back a pace.

  The door opened. “Come in, come in.” The skinny little bald man who greeted them looked like a tailor, but tailors did not commonly carry submachine guns. He looked them over, lowered the weapon. “Just you three? Where are the rest?”

  “Just us,” Goldfarb answered. “A couple scattered off to the other hidey-holes, a couple others won’t be going anywhere any more. About what we figured.” The casual way he said that chilled Russie. His cousin went on, “We’re not hanging around here, either, you know. You have what we need?”

  “You need to ask?” With a scornful sniff the bald little man pointed to bundles on the couch. “There-change your clothes.”

  “Clothes are only part of it,” Goldfarb’s tough-looking friend said. “The rest is taken care of, too?”

  “The rest is taken care of.” The bald fellow sniffed again, this time angrily. “We wouldn’t be good for much if it weren’t, would we?”

  “Who knows what we’re good for?” the nameless fighter answered, but he shrugged off his shabby wool jacket and started unbuttoning his shirt. Moishe had no jacket to shrug off. He shed with a long sigh of relief the clothes he’d been wearing since he was captured. Their replacements didn’t fit as well, but so what? They were clean.

  “Good thing the Lizards haven’t figured out prison uniforms; they’d have made it harder for us to do a vanishing act with you,” Goldfarb said as he, too, changed. His Yiddish was plenty fluent, but full of odd turns of phrase he didn’t seem to notice, as if he was using it to express ideas that came first in English. He probably was.

  “You’re staying here, right, Shmuel?” asked the nondescript little Jew who kept the flat. The nameless fighter, now nameless no more, nodded. So did the little fellow, who turned to Moishe and Goldfarb. He handed each of them a thin rectangle of some shiny stuff, about the size of a playing card. Moishe looked at his. A picture that vaguely resembled him looked back from it. The card gave details of a life he’d never led. The bald little man said, “Don’t pull these out unless you have to. With luck, you’ll be away before they do a proper job of cordoning off the city.”

  “And without luck, we’ll buy a plot,” Goldfarb said, holding up his own card “This bloke looks more like Goebbels than he does like me.”

  “Best we could do,” the bald Jew said with a shrug. “That’s why you don’t want to wave it around unless somebody asks for it. But if somebody does, he probably won’t look at it; he’ll feed it into a Lizard machine-and it sh
ows you’ve been authorized for the past two weeks to leave Lodz on a buying trip.” He clucked mournfully. “Cost us plenty to pay off a Pole who works for the Lizards to make these for us, and he’d only take the best.”

  “Gold?” Russie asked.

  “Worse,” the fellow answered. “Tobacco. Gold at least stays in circulation. Tobacco, you smoke it and it’s gone.”

  “Tobacco.” Goldfarb sounded even more mournful than the bald Jew had. “What I wouldn’t give for a fag. It’s been a bloody long time.”

  Russie didn’t care one way or the other about tobacco. He’d never got the habit, and his medical studies made him pretty sure it wasn’t good for you. But it did show how far the underground had gone to rescue him. That warmed him, especially since some people thought him a traitor for broadcasting for the Lizards. He said, “Thank you more than I know how to tell you. I-”

  Shmuel cut him off: “Listen, you’d better get out of here. You want to thank us, broadcast from England.”

  “He’s right,” David Goldfarb said. “Come on, cousin. Standing around chattering doesn’t up the chances of our living to collect an old age pension-not that we’re in serious danger of it at any rate, things being as they are.”

  Out of the flat, out of the block of flats, they went. As they walked north, they listened to rumors swirl around them: “All the prisoners free-” “The Nazis did it. My aunt saw a man in a German helmet-” “Half the Lizards in Lodz killed, I heard. My wife’s brother says-”

  “By tomorrow, they’ll be saying the Lizards dropped an atomic bomb on this place,” Goldfarb remarked dryly.

  “Did you hear what he said?” someone going the other way exclaimed. “They used an atomic bomb to blow up the prison.” Russie and Goldfarb looked at each other, shook their heads, and started to laugh.

  Less than an hour had gone by since the first blast (piat, Goldfarb called it, which sounded more Polish than either Yiddish or English) hit the prison, but the streets heading out of the ghetto already had checkpoints on them; the Lizards and their human henchmen, Order Service thugs and Polish bullies, had wasted not a moment. Some people took one look and decided they didn’t need to leave after all; others queued up to show they had the right.

  Moishe started to get into a line that led up to a couple of Poles. Goldfarb pulled him out of it. “No, no,” he said loudly. “Come on over here. This line is much shorter.”

  Of course that line was much shorter: at its head stood three Lizards. Nobody in his right mind wanted to trust his fate to them when human beings were around. Humans might be thugs, but at least they were your own kind of thugs. But Moishe couldn’t drag Goldfarb back from the line he’d chosen without making a scene, and he didn’t dare do that. Convinced his cousin was leading them to their doom, he took his place in the queue that led up to the aliens.

  Sure enough, the wait to get to them was short. A Lizard turned one eye turret toward Russie, the other toward Goldfarb. “You is?” he asked in bad Yiddish. He repeated the question in worse Polish.

  “Adam Zilverstajn,” Goldfarb answered at once, using the name on his new, forged identity card.

  “Felix Kirshbojm,” Moishe said more hesitantly.

  He waited for alarms to go off, for guns to be pointed and maybe fired. But the Lizard just stuck out his hand and said, “Card.” Again, Goldfarb promptly surrendered his. Again, Moishe paused almost long enough to draw suspicion to himself before he handed his over.

  The Lizard fed Goldfarb’s card into a slot on a square metal box that sat on a table next to him. The box gulped it down as if alive. While still collaborating with the Lizards, Russie had seen enough of their astonishing gadgetry to wonder if perhaps that wasn’t so. It spat out Goldfarb’s phony card. The Lizard looked at a display-like a miniature movie screen, Moishe thought-it held in its hand. “You go on business? You be back-seven days?” it said as it returned the card to Moishe’s cousin.

  “That’s right,” Goldfarb agreed.

  Then Russie’s card went into the machine. He almost broke and ran as the Lizard turned an eye turret toward the handheld display; he was sure words like traitor and escapee showed up there. But evidently they didn’t, for the Lizard waited till the card came out again, then said, “You go business seven days, too?”

  “Yes,” Moishe said, remembering not to tack “superior sir” onto the end.

  “You both go seven days,” the Lizard said. “You go-how to say-together?”

  “Yes,” Moishe repeated. He wondered if the Lizards were looking for people traveling in groups. But the guard just handed him his card and got ready to receive the next set of people passing through the checkpoint.

  David Goldfarb indulged in the luxury of a long, heartfelt “Whew!” as soon as they’d walked a couple of hundred meters past the guard and out of the ghetto.

  Whew! did not seem enough to Moishe. “Gottenyu,” he said, and then added, “I thought you’d killed us both when you pulled me into that line with the Lizards.”

  “Oh, that.” Now Goldfarb looked jaunty. “No, I knew just what I was doing there.”

  “You could have fooled me!”

  “No, seriously-look at it. If we go through a line with Poles or those Order Service would-be Nazi shmucks, they’re liable to look at the pictures on the cards-and if they do that, we re dead. No matter what the machine tells them, they’ll see we don’treally look like the pictures on the cards or not enough, anyhow. But the Lizards can’t tell you from Hedy Lamarr without the machine to do it for them, That’s why I wanted them to check us.”

  Moishe thought it over and found himself nodding. “Cousin,” he said admiringly “you’ve got chutzpah.”

  “Never get anywhere with the girls if I didn’t,” Goldfarb said, grinning. “You ought to see a chap I served with named Jerome Jones-he had crust enough to make a pie, he did.”

  Watching the way his cousin smiled put Moishe in mind of his mother. But Goldfarb also had an alienness about him that went deeper than the curious expressions peppering his Yiddish. He wasn’t automatically wary the way Polish Jews were. “So that’s what growing up really free does for you,” Moishe murmured.

  “What did you say?”

  “Never mind. Where will we pick up Rivka and Reuven?” Russie wondered if Goldfarb had lied to him about them just to get him moving. The man had the gall for it, no two ways about that.

  But Goldfarb just asked, “Are you sure you want to find out? Suppose the Lizards catch you but kill me? The less you know, the less they can squeeze out of you.”

  “They aren’t as good at squeezing as you’d think,” Moishe said. “They didn’t come close to getting everything I know out of me.” Nevertheless, he didn’t push the question. Mordechai Anielewicz’s Jewish fighters had had that don’t-ask-if-you-don’t-need-to-know rule, too. Which meant… “You were-you are-a soldier.”

  Goldfarb nodded. “RAF, actually, but yes. And you were going to be a doctor, before the Nazis came. My father used to beat me over the head with that; all I ever wanted to do was fiddle around with the insides of radios and such. Made me a valuable piece of goods when the war came, though: they put me into radar training straightaway, and I kept an eye on the Jerries all through the Blitz.”

  Russie didn’t follow all of that; a couple of key words were in English, of which he knew next to nothing. He was content just to walk along for a while, savoring his freedom and daring to think about staying free a while longer. If his accomplished cousin was from the British military, maybe a submarine like the one Anielewicz had sometimes summoned lay waiting off the Polish coast. He started to ask about that, then changed his mind. If he didn’t need to know, what was the point in trying to learn?

  Goldfarb hurried up Krawiecka Street. He looked nervously to the right and left as he did. Finally, he said, “The sooner we’re out of Lodz, the better I’ll like it. Outside the ghetto, a Jew really sticks out around here, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, of course,” Moishe
answered. Then he realized it wasn’t of course, not to his cousin. Years of living in the ghetto and before that in a Poland that didn’t know how to deal with its three million Jews had made him so used to being the suspected and despised outsider that he took it for granted. Being reminded things weren’t like that all over the world came as a distinct shock. “Must be nice, seeming like everyone else,” he said wistfully.

  “You mean, instead of getting slammed down just for being a Jew?” David Goldfarb said. Russie nodded. His cousin went on, “It is, I suppose. There’s a good deal of small stuff left to fret over: people have a way or taking for granted that you’re cheap or not very brave or what have you. But next to what I’ve seen here, what my folks left-blimey!” That wasn’t Yiddish, either, but Moishe had no trouble figuring out what it meant.

  If the submarine came, if it whisked him and his family off to England-would he be able to deal with so much freedom? Learning a new language as a grown man wouldn’t come easy for him. Thinking thus, for a moment he was almost paralyzed with dread at the prospect of abandoning everything familiar, no matter how unpleasant it could be.

  Then he and Goldfarb strode past a couple of Polish housewives chattering on a front porch. The two pretty women stopped talking and stared at them as if they expected the plague to break out in their wake. They kept on staring until the men had gone a block farther down the road.

  Moishe sighed. “No, maybe I won’t be sorry to get out of here after all.”

  “I know what you mean,” his cousin answered. “Everyone here keeps thinking we’re about to make off with the good silver. I shan’t be sorry to see the last of that myself. If all goes well, we should have you and yours back in England in a couple of weeks. How does that strike you?”

  “The word that comes to mind is mechaieh,” Moishe said. His cousin grinned and clapped him on the back.