Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Otto Skorzeny hadn’t been kidding when he said he wanted the wireless men to stay alert. He made sure they did, hanging around them and regaling them with what seemed like an endless stream of dirty stories. Most of them were good dirty stories, too, and some were even new to Jäger, who’d thought he’d heard every story of that sort ever invented.

  As morning gave way to afternoon, Skorzeny’s temper began to wear thin. He paced through the camp, kicking up dirt and sending spring flowers flying. “Damn it, we should have intercepted something from the Jews or the Lizards in Lodz by now!” he stormed.

  “Maybe they’re all dead,” Jäger suggested. The notion horrflied him, but might ease Skorzeny’s mind.

  But the big SS man shook his head. “Too much to hope for. Somebody always lives through these things by one kind of fool luck or another.” Jäger thought of Max, the foulmouthed Jew who’d lived through Babi Yar. Skorzeny was right. He went on with a muttered, “No, something’s gone south somewhere.”

  “You think the timer didn’t work the way it should have?” Jäger asked.

  “I suppose it is possible,” Skorzeny allowed, “but fry me for a schnitzel if I ever heard of one of them failing before. They aren’t just foolproof, they’re idiotproof, and the gadget had a backup. We send out a goody like that, we want to make sure it works as advertised.” He chuckled. “That’s what people who don’t like us so well call German efficiency, eh? No, the only way that bomb could have failed would have been—”

  “What?” Jäger said, though he had an idea as to what. “As you say. If it had a backup timer, it was going to go off.”

  “The only way that bomb could have failed—” Skorzeny repeated musingly. His gray eyes went very wide. “The only way that bomb could have failed would have been for that stinking little kike to pull the wool over my eyes, and dip me in shit if he didn’t do it!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “The bastard! The fucker! The nerve of him! Next time I see him, I’ll cut off his balls one at a time.” Then, to Jäger’s amazement, he started to laugh. “He played me for a sucker. I didn’t think any man alive could do that. I’d like to shake his hand—after he’s castrated, not before. You think stupid kike and you take it for granted, and this is what it gets you. Jesus Christ!”

  Also a Jew, Jäger thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he asked, “What now? If the Jews in Lodz know what it is”—and if they do, or guess, it’s thanks to me, and how do I feel about that?—“they’ve got their hands on something they can use against us.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Skorzeny sounded disgusted, maybe with the Jews, maybe with himself. He wasn’t used to failing. Then he brightened. For a moment, he looked like his old, devilish self. “Maybe we can plaster the place with rockets and long-range artillery, hope to blow up the damned thing that way, at least deny the Jews the use of it.” He made an unhappy clucking noise. “It’s bloody long odds, though.”

  “Too true,” Jäger said, as if sympathetically. “Those rockets pack a decent punch, but you can’t tell for sure whether they’ll hit the right town, let alone the right street.”

  “I wish we had some of the toys the Lizards know how to make,” Skorzeny said, still discontented with the world. “They don’t just hit the right street. They’ll pick a room for you. Hell, they’ll fly into a closet if that’s what you want.” He scratched at his chin. “Well, one way or another, those Jews are going to pay. And when they do, I’ll be the one who collects.” He sounded very sure of himself.

  Off in the next room at the Army and Navy General Hospital in Hot Springs, there were so many car batteries that they’d had to reinforce the floor to take the weight. Among the Lizard gadgets they powered was the radio set taken from the shuttlecraft that had brought Straha down to Earth when he defected to the United States.

  Now he and Sam Yeager sat in front of that radio, flipping from one frequency to another in an effort to monitor the Lizards’ signals and find out what the Race was up to. Right now, they weren’t picking up much anywhere. Straha had the leisure to turn to Yeager and ask, “How many of our males do you have engaged in the practice of espionage and signal gathering?”

  “Numbers? Who knows?” Sam answered. If he had known, he wouldn’t have told Straha. One of the things he’d had drilled into him was that you didn’t tell anybody, human or Lizard, anything he didn’t have to know. “But a lot of them, a lot of the time. Not many of us Big Uglies”—he used the Lizards’ nickname for mankind unselfconsciously—“speak your language well enough to follow without help from one of you.”

  “You, Sam Yeager, I think you could succeed at this,” Straha said, which made Sam feel damn good. He thought he could have gained even more fluency in the Lizards’ language if he hadn’t also had to spend time with Robert Goddard. On the other hand, he would have learned more about rockets if he hadn’t had to spend time with Straha and the other Lizard POWs.

  And he would have learned more about his baby son if he hadn’t been in the Army. That would have kept Barbara happier, too; he worried about not seeing her enough. There weren’t enough hours in a day, in a year, in a lifetime, to do all the things he wanted to do. That was true all the time, but trying to keep up during a war rubbed your nose in it.

  Straha touched the frequency-advance toggle. The Lizard numbers in the display showed that the radio was now monitoring a frequency a tenth of a megacycle higher (or rather, something that worked out to be about an eighth of a megacycle—the Lizards naturally used their own units rather than those of mankind). A male’s voice came out of the speaker.

  Yeager leaned forward and listened intently. The Lizard was apparently in a rear area, and complaining about rockets falling nearby and disrupting resupply efforts for the troops pushing toward Denver. “That’s good news,” Sam said, scribbling notes.

  “Truth,” Straha agreed. “Your ventures into uncharted technology are paying a handsome profit for your species. If the Race were so innovative, Tosev 3 would long since have been conquered—provided the Race had not blown itself to radioactive dust in innovative frenzy.”

  “You think that’s what we would have done if you hadn’t invaded?” Sam asked.

  “It is certainly one of the higher probabilities,” Straha said, and Yeager was hard-pressed to disagree with him. The ex-shiplord flipped to a new frequency. The Lizard talking now sounded angry as all get-out. “He is ordering the dismissal, demotion, and transfer of a local commander in a region called Illinois,” Straha said. Yeager nodded. The Lizard went on, “Where is this Illinois place?”

  Sam showed him on a map. He was listening, too. “Something about letting a pack of prisoners escape or get rescued or something. The fellow who’s cursing him is really doing quite a job, isn’t he?”

  “If said snout-to-snout, telling a male that someone shit in his egg before it hatched is guaranteed to start a fight,” Straha said.

  “I believe it.” Sam listened to the radio some more. “They’re moving that incompetent officer to—upstate New York.” He wrote it down. “That’s worth knowing. With luck, we’ll be able to take advantage of his weaknesses over there, too.”

  “Truth,” Straha said again, this time in bemused tones. “You Big Uglies aggressively exploit the intelligence you gather, and you gather great quantities of it. Do you do this in your own conflicts as well?”

  “Don’t know,” Yeager answered. “I’ve never been in a war before, and I’m only a little fellow in this one.” He thought back to his ballplaying days, and to all the signs he and his teammates had stolen. Mutt Daniels was a genius at that kind of thing. He wondered how—and if—Mutt was doing these days.

  Straha shifted to yet another frequency. An excited-sounding Lizard was relaying a long, involved message. “Ah, that is most interesting,” Straha said when he was done.

  “I didn’t follow all of it,” Sam confessed, embarrassed at having to say that after Straha had praised his grasp of the Lizards’ tongue. “Something about ginger
and calculator fraud, whatever that is.”

  “Not calculator fraud—computer fraud,” Straha said. “I do not blame you for not understanding completely. You Big Uglies, while technically far more advanced than you have any business being, as yet have no real grasp of the potential of computing machines.”

  “Maybe not,” Yeager said. “Sounds like we don’t have any grasp of how to commit crimes with them, either.”

  Straha’s mouth dropped open in amusement. “Committing the crime is easy. Males in the payroll section diverted payments to ginger purveyors into accounts of which only they and the purveyors—and, of course, the computers—were aware. Since no one else knew these accounts existed, no one not party to the secret could access them. The computers would not announce their presence; it was, in essence, a perfect scheme.”

  “We have a saying that there’s no such thing as a perfect crime,” Yeager remarked. “What went wrong with this one?”

  Straha laughed again. “Nothing is accident-proof. A male in the accounting section who was not part of the miscreants’ scheme was investigating a legitimate account. But he made a mistake in entering the number of that account and found himself looking at one of the concealed ones. He recognized it at once for what it was and notflied his superiors, who began a larger investigation. Many males will find themselves in difficulties because of it.”

  “Hope you won’t be angry if I tell you that doesn’t make me too unhappy,” Sam said. “Who would have thought the Race would turn out to have drug fiends? Makes you seem almost human—no offense.”

  “I shall endeavor to take none,” Straha replied with dignity.

  Yeager kept his face straight; Straha was getting pretty good at interpreting human expressions, and he didn’t want the Lizard to see how funny he thought that was. He said, “I wonder if we have any way to use the news, maybe make some of your people think males who aren’t ginger tasters really are. Something like that, anyhow.”

  “You have an evilly twisted mind, Sam Yeager,” Straha said.

  “Thank you,” Sam answered, which made Straha first jerk both eye turrets toward him and then start to laugh as he understood it was a joke. Yeager went on, “You might talk with some of our propaganda people, maybe ask if they want you to broadcast about it. Who knows what kind of trouble you might stir up?”

  “Who indeed?” Straha said. “I shall do that.” It wasn’t quite It shall be done, the Lizards’ equivalent for Yes, sir, but it was more deference than Sam had ever got from Straha before. Little by little, he was earning respect.

  When his shift was done, he started to go upstairs to see Barbara and Jonathan, but ran into Ristin and Ullhass in the hospital lobby. Those two Lizard POWs were old buddies; he’d captured them back in the summer of 1942, when the Lizard invasion was new and looked irresistible. By now, they seemed well on the way to becoming Americans, and wore their official U.S. prisoner-of-war red-white-and-blue body paint with considerable pride. They’d also picked up pretty good English over the last couple of years.

  “Hey, Sam,” Ristin said in that language. “Baseball this afternoon?”

  “Yes,” Ullhass echoed. “Baseball!” He added an emphatic cough.

  “Maybe later—not now,” Sam said, to which both Lizards responded with steam-whistle noises of disappointment. With their fast, skittery movements, they made surprisingly good middle infielders, and had taken to the game well. Their small size and forward-sloping posture gave them a strike zone about the size of a postage stamp, too, so they were good leadoff men—well, leadoff males—even if they seldom hit the ball hard.

  “Good weather for a game,” Ristin said, doing his best to tempt Sam. A lot of soldiers played ball when they were off duty, but Ristin and Ullhass were the only Lizards who joined in. With Yeager’s endless years of bush-league experience, everybody was glad to see him out there, and people had put up with his Lizard pals for his sake. Now Ullhass and Ristin were starting to get noticed for the way they played, not for their scaly hides.

  “Maybe later,” Sam repeated. “Now I want to see my wife and son. If you don’t mind too much.” The Lizards sighed in resignation. They knew families mattered to Tosevites, but it didn’t feel real to them, any more than Yeager understood in his gut how much their precious Emperor meant to them. He headed for the stairs. Ristin and Ullhass started practicing phantom double plays. Ristin, who mostly played second, had a hell of a fast pivot.

  Up on the fourth floor, Jonathan was telling the world in no uncertain terms that he didn’t care for something or other it had done to him. Listening to him yowl, Sam was glad the Lizards who lived up there weren’t around to hear the racket. It sometimes drove him a little squirrely, and he was a human being.

  The crying stopped, very suddenly. Sam knew what that meant: Barbara had given the baby her breast. Sam smiled as he opened the door to their room. He was fond of his wife’s breasts, too, and figured the kid took after his old man.

  Barbara looked up from the chair in which she was nursing Jonathan. She didn’t seem as badly beat up as she had just after he was born, but she wasn’t what you’d call perky, either. “Hello, honey,” she said. “Shut the door quietly, would you? He may fall asleep. He’s certainly been fussing as if he was tired.”

  Sam noted the precise grammar there, as he often did when his wife talked. He sometimes envied her fancy education; he’d left high school to play ball, though an insatiable curiosity had kept him reading this and finding out little fragmented pieces of that ever since. Barbara never complained about his lack of formal schooling, but it bothered him anyhow.

  Sure enough, Jonathan did go to sleep. The kid was growing; he took up more room in the cradle now than he had when he was first born. As soon as Sam saw he would stay down after Barbara put him in there, he touched her on the arm and said, “I got a present for you, hon. Well, really it’s a present for both of us, but you can go first with it. I’ve been saving it all morning long, so I figure I can last a little longer.”

  The buildup intrigued her. “What do you have?” she breathed.

  “It’s not anything fancy,” he warned. “Not a diamond, not a convertible.” They both laughed, not quite comfortably. It would be a long time. If ever, before you could start thinking about driving a convertible. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a new corncob pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco, then handed them to her with a flourish. “Here you go.”

  She stared as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. “Where did you get them?”

  “This colored guy came around early this morning, selling ’em,” Sam answered. “He’s from up in the northern part of the state, where they grow some tobacco. Cost me fifty bucks, but what the heck? I don’t have a whole lot of things to spend money on, so why not?”

  “It’s all right with me. It’s better than all right with me, as a matter of fact.” Barbara stuck the empty pipe in her mouth. “I never smoked one of these before. I probably look like a Southern granny.”

  “Babe, you always look good to me,” Yeager said. Barbara’s expression softened. Keeping your wife happy was definitely worth doing—especially when you meant every word you said. He tapped at the tobacco pouch with his index finger. “You want me to load the pipe for you?”

  “Would you, please?” she said, so he did. He had a Zippo, fueled now not by lighter fluid but by moonshine. He had no idea how he’d keep it going when he ran out of flints, but that hadn’t happened yet. He flicked the wheel with his thumb. A pale, almost invisible alcohol flame sprang into being. He held it over the bowl of the pipe.

  Barbara’s cheeks hollowed as she inhaled. “Careful,” Sam warned. “Pipe tobacco’s a lot stronger than what you get in cigarettes, and—” Her eyes crossed. She coughed like somebody in the last throes of consumption. “—you haven’t smoked much of anything lately,” he finished unnecessarily.

  “No kidding.” Her voice was a raspy wheeze. “Remember that bit in Tom Sawyer? ‘First Pipes—“I’ve Lost My Kni
fe,” ’ something like that. I know just how Tom felt. That stuff is strong.”

  “Let me try,” Sam said, and took the pipe from her. He drew on it cautiously. He knew about pipe tobacco, and knew what any tobacco could do to you when you hadn’t smoked for a while. Even taking all that into account, Barbara was right; what smoldered in that pipe was strong as the devil. It might have been cured and mellowed for fifteen, maybe even twenty minutes—smoking it felt like scraping coarse sandpaper over his tongue and the inside of his mouth. Spit flooded from every salivary gland he owned, including a few he hadn’t known were there. He felt dizzy, almost woozy for a second—and he knew enough not to draw much smoke down into his lungs. He coughed a couple of times himself. “Wowie!”

  “Here, give it back to me,” Barbara said. She made another, much more circumspect, try, then exhaled. “God! That is to tobacco what bathtub gin was to the real stuff.”

  “You’re too young to know about bathtub gin,” he said severely. Memories of some pounding headaches came back to haunt him. He puffed on the pipe again himself. It wasn’t a bad comparison.

  Barbara giggled. “One of my favorite uncles was a part-time bootlegger. I had quite a high-school graduation party—from what I remember of it, anyway.” She took the pipe back from Sam. “I’m going to need a while to get used to this again.”

  “Yeah, we’ll probably be there just about when that pouch goes empty,” he agreed. “God knows when that colored fellow will come through town again. If he ever does.”

  They smoked the bowl empty, then filled it again. The room grew thick with smoke. Sam’s eyes watered. He felt loose and easy, the way he had after a cigarette in the good old days. That he also felt slightly nauseated and his mouth like raw meat was only a detail, as far as he was concerned.

  “That’s good,” Barbara said meditatively, and punctuated her words with another set of coughs. She waved those aside. “Worth it.”